Prepping to break every past release... - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Joshua D. Drake
Subject Prepping to break every past release...
Date
Msg-id 1236198779.18420.48.camel@jd-laptop.pragmaticzealot.org
Whole thread Raw
Responses Re: Prepping to break every past release...  (Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>)
Re: Prepping to break every past release...  (Dave Page <dpage@pgadmin.org>)
Re: Prepping to break every past release...  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
Re: Prepping to break every past release...  (Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>)
Re: Prepping to break every past release...  (Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>)
Re: Prepping to break every past release...  (Greg Smith <gsmith@gregsmith.com>)
Re: Prepping to break every past release...  (Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>)
Re: Prepping to break every past release...  (Simon Riggs <simon@2ndQuadrant.com>)
List pgsql-hackers
Hello,

Something that continues to grind my teeth about our software is that we
are horribly inconsistent with our system catalogs. Now I am fully and
100% aware that changing this will break things in user land but I want
to do it anyway. In order to do that I believe we need to come up with a
very loud, extremely verbose method of communicating to people that 8.5
*will* break things. 

It seems to me that the best method would be to follow the
information_schema naming conventions as information_schema is standard
compliant (right?).

Thoughts?

Examples:

postgres=# \d pg_class     Table "pg_catalog.pg_class"    Column     |   Type    | Modifiers 
----------------+-----------+-----------relname        | name      | not nullrelnamespace   | oid       | not null
[...]

postgres=# \d pg_tables   View "pg_catalog.pg_tables"  Column    |  Type   | Modifiers 
-------------+---------+-----------schemaname  | name    | tablename   | name    | 

postgres=# \d pg_stat_user_tables         View "pg_catalog.pg_stat_user_tables"     Column      |           Type
  | Modifiers 
 
------------------+--------------------------+-----------relid            | oid                      | schemaname
|name                     | relname          | name                     | 
 


postgres=# \d information_schema.tables                      View "information_schema.tables"           Column
 |               Type                |
 
Modifiers 
------------------------------+-----------------------------------+-----------table_catalog                |
information_schema.sql_identifier| table_schema                 | information_schema.sql_identifier | table_name
          | information_schema.sql_identifier | 
 


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