It couldn't! The inital values (as far as I can tell) are either
compiled in, or fed in through the bootstrap process (text).
this would have caused problems in previous releases as well, if it is
the case.
On Thu, 5 March 1998, at 03:47:25, Thomas G. Lockhart wrote:
> > Why would the atttypmod affect anything before it in the struct? I
> > have verified that everything is shifted over for bytes, but that
> > would lead be to beleive that somewhere the length of the first
> > attribute (Oid) is being miscalculated? Where would the code write to
> > this data structure without using a pointer to actual struct for
> > obtaining the correct memory structure? I checked for offsetof macro
> > calls that might cause this effect, to no avail.
>
> Just speculating here, but I do know that the Alpha will force alignment
> within structures. So, if the structure is filled by reading a byte stream
> from a file, rather than filled field-by-field, it will misalign if it has
> integers < 4 bytes. During the initialization phase, the backend probably does
> not go through the file manager, but does some brute-force reading of each
> file on disk.
>
> - Tom
