Re: Do we need use more meaningful variables to replace 0 in catalog head files?

On Tue, Nov 15, 2016 at 4:50 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 13, 2016 at 9:48 AM, Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> wrote:
>> I'm not convinced the line prefix part is necessary, though. What I'm
>> thinking of is something like this:
>>
>> PROCDATA( oid=1242 name=boolin isstrict=t volatile=i parallel=s nargs=1
>>     rettype=bool argtypes="cstring" src=boolin );
>
> I liked Tom's format a lot better.  If we put this in a separate file
> rather than in the header, which I favor, the PROCDATA stuff is just
> noise.  On the other hand, having the name as the first thing on the
> line seems *excellent* for readability.


Just throwing this out there....

It would be neat if the file format was precisely a tab or comma
separated file suitable for loading into the appropriate table with
COPY or loading into a spreadsheet. Then we might be able to maintain
it by editing the table using SQL updates and/or other tools without
having to teach them a particular input format.

The trick would then be to have a preprocessing step in the build
which loaded the CSV/TSV files into hash tables and replaced all the
strings or other tokens with OIDs and magic values.


-- 
greg