Re: building pg_dump doesn't work - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Tom Lane
Subject Re: building pg_dump doesn't work
Date
Msg-id 17291.1236117318@sss.pgh.pa.us
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: building pg_dump doesn't work  (Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com>)
Responses Re: building pg_dump doesn't work  (Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com>)
Re: building pg_dump doesn't work  (Zdenek Kotala <Zdenek.Kotala@Sun.COM>)
List pgsql-hackers
Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com> writes:
> Alvaro Herrera wrote:
>> I noticed that if you start from a clean tree, it doesn't work to build
>> pg_dump because gram.h has not been generated yet:

> This patch fixes it.

I think this is probably going in the wrong direction.  The reason
gram.h isn't already in the main include tree is that we don't *want*
all and sundry depending on it --- we have very carefully minimized
the number of files that depend on the grammar's symbol codes.

ISTM that pg_dump doesn't actually care about the symbol codes, it
just needs a list of known keywords.  Can we refactor things so that
the frontend-side version of the keyword list doesn't include the
grammar symbols at all?

One idea that comes to mind is to replace the entries like
{"abort", ABORT_P, UNRESERVED_KEYWORD},

with macro calls
PG_KEYWORD("abort", ABORT_P, UNRESERVED_KEYWORD),

and then the frontend build of the file could define the macro
to ignore its second argument.

The way we do it now seems to have other disadvantages too: we are
incorporating a backend .o file into pg_dump as-is, which would lead
to large problems if there were differences in say the compiler flags
needed.  In fact, I thought Zdenek had been working on decoupling
that sort of thing, so I'm a bit surprised it's still like this at all.
        regards, tom lane


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