> Hi Alvaro, > > Here are the latest patches, which includes the regression fix.
Thank you.
Taking a step back after discussing this with some colleagues, I need to contradict what I said at the start of this thread. There's a worry that changing pg_attribute.attnotnull in the way I initially suggested might not be such a great idea after all. I did a quick search using codesearch.debian.net for applications reading that column and thinking about how they would react to this change; I think in the end it's going to be quite disastrous. We would break a vast number of these apps, and there are probably countless other apps and frameworks that we would also break. Everybody would hate us forever. Upgrading to Postgres 18 would become as bad an experience as the drastic change of implicit casts to text in 8.3. Nothing else in the intervening 17 years strikes me as so problematic as this change would be.
So I think we may need to go back and somehow leave pg_attribute alone, to avoid breaking the whole world. Maybe it would be sufficient to change the CompactAttribute->attnotnull to no longer be a boolean, but the new char representation instead. I'm not sure if this would actually work.
Thank you for your feedback. I understand that this change could be problematic
for existing applications, as attnotnull is a highly generic catalog column. I will
revisit the patch, make the necessary adjustments, and submit a revised version
accordingly.
I appreciate your insights and will try to submit the new patch.
