We agreed that we ought to do $SUBJECT in 9.1. Right offhand the
outlines of a cleaner solution look pretty obvious:
* Create a datatype with the same internal representation as TEXT;
make its input and recv routines throw errors, while the output
routines just reuse textout/textsend.
* Provide an implicit cast to (but not from) text, so that we don't
break any queries doing textual functions on these columns.
* Change all system catalog columns holding expression trees to be
declared as this type.
* Modify the at-risk functions to take inputs of this type instead
of text.
The only thing that seems like it might need discussion is the name
to give the datatype. My first instinct was pg_expr or pg_expression,
but there are some cases where this doesn't exactly fit. In particular,
pg_rewrite.ev_action contains a whole Query, in fact a list of them.
We could go with something like pg_parse_tree, perhaps. Or maybe
that's overthinking it.
Note that this approach will prevent even superusers from injecting
manually-created values into these columns and functions. I don't see a
problem with that, and note that if a superuser really wants to do it,
he can create a cast that will let him. I can't remember ever having
needed to do such a thing myself, so I think the debugging use-case
for it is nonexistent.
Comments, suggestions?
regards, tom lane
