Re: remove bits* types

Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker <ilmari@ilmari.org>

From: Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker <ilmari@ilmari.org>
To: Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>
Cc: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, Melanie Plageman <melanieplageman@gmail.com>, Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org>, Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>, Álvaro Herrera <alvherre@kurilemu.de>, Pg Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2026-03-30T17:36:48Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com> writes:

> On Mon, Mar 30, 2026 at 01:07:32PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com> writes:
>>> With Melanie's note, there are at least 4 votes in favor of this patch
>>> (Andres, me, Peter, and Melanie).  AFAICT Michael is +/-0, Álvaro and Tom
>>> are -1 (or somewhere in the vicinity), and Robert seems ambivalent.  Hm...
>> 
>> To clarify, what I said was we should either remove them or use them
>> more consistently.  I don't think 1bd6f22f4 moved the needle very
>> far towards option 2, so I'm totally fine with option 1.  Put me
>> down as +0.5.
>
> Thanks for clarifying.  Given that update and Álvaro's note upthread [0],
> I'd argue we're in rough consensus territory and can move forward with the
> patch.  If no objections materialize shortly, I'll do so.

To avoid breaking extensions, we could leave the typedefs in place with
an #ifndef guard on some symbol that's only defined when building
postgres itself, but not when building extensions (or vice versa with an
#ifdef instead).

This is used a lot in Perl for things we don't want to use in core any
more, but we don't want to break CPAN modules still using.

- ilmari






Commits

  1. Remove bits* typedefs.