Re: GiST support for inet datatypes

On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 3:56 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Emre Hasegeli <emre@hasegeli.com> writes:
>> How about only removing the inet and the cidr operator classes
>> from btree_gist. btree-gist-drop-inet-v2.patch does that.
>
> I'm not sure which part of "no" you didn't understand, but to be
> clear: you don't get to break existing installations.
>
> Assuming that this opclass is sufficiently better than the existing one,
> it would sure be nice if it could become the default; but I've not seen
> any proposal in this thread that would allow that without serious upgrade
> problems.  I think the realistic alternatives so far are (1) new opclass
> is not the default, or (2) this patch gets rejected.
>
> We should probably expend some thought on a general approach to
> replacing the default opclass for a datatype, because I'm sure this
> will come up again.  Right now I don't see a feasible way.

It seems odd for "default" to be a property of the opclass rather than
a separate knob.  What comes to mind is something like:

ALTER TYPE sniffle SET DEFAULT OPERATOR CLASS FOR btree TO achoo_ops;

Not sure how much that helps.

-- 
Robert Haas
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