Re: autogenerating headers & bki stuff

On Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 8:46 PM, Tom Lane<tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
>> Introducing defaults for DATA() would bring some benefits because it
>> would mostly avoid the need to change every row in the file when
>> adding a new column.  But a preprocessing script can do much more
>> sophisticated transformations, like computing a value for a column, or
>> looking up type names in another file and translating them into OIDs.
>
> Hmm.  A preprocessing script that produces DATA commands might in fact
> be a reasonable proposal, but it was not what I understood you to be
> suggesting before.

OK, sorry if I was unclear.  I'm not sure exactly what you mean by
producing DATA() commands; I think the output should be BKI directly.
One of the things this patch does that I think is good (however flawed
it may be otherwise) is unifies all of the stuff that needs to parse
the DATA() statements into a single script.  I think this is something
we should pursue, because I think it will simplify the introduction of
any other notation we want to consider in this area (regardless of
whether it's DATA_DEFAULTS or EXEC_BKI or what have you).

Maybe I should rip out all the anum.h stuff (sniff, I'm sad, I liked
that design...) and resubmit.

...Robert