Re: Retail DDL

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Álvaro Herrera <alvherre@kurilemu.de>
Cc: Kirill Reshke <reshkekirill@gmail.com>, Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>, Ziga <ziga@ljudmila.org>, pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org
Date: 2025-08-16T14:22:50Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
=?utf-8?Q?=C3=81lvaro?= Herrera <alvherre@kurilemu.de> writes:
> On 2025-Aug-16, Kirill Reshke wrote:
>> After putting some more thought into it, maybe we can implement the
>> whole thing as contrib extension? This would be the most Postgres-y
>> way to me.

> If we do that, then core tools such as psql or pg_dump can never depend
> on them.  -1 from me.

pg_dump will never depend on any such thing anyway.  It has too many
special-purpose requirements, like needing to split up object
definitions in particular ways, cope with very old server versions,
etc etc.  Insisting that this feature support pg_dump is a good way
of making sure that nothing useful will emerge at all.

Maybe we could replace (some of) psql's describe.c logic with
server-side code, but I'm skeptical that there'd be much win
there either.

So I don't really buy Álvaro's argument above.  It'd be better
to design to some concrete requirement that isn't either of
those.  Unfortunately, it's not clear to me that anyone has
a concrete use-case in mind that isn't either of those.

			regards, tom lane