Re: Why don't we have a small reserved OID range for patch revisions?

On Thu, Feb 28, 2019 at 3:40 PM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> >>> just as a thought, what if we stopped assigning manual OIDs for new
> >>> catalog entries altogether, except for once at the end of each release
> >>> cycle?
>
> Actually ... that leads to an idea that wouldn't add any per-commit
> overhead, or really much change at all to existing processes.  Given
> the existence of a reliable OID-renumbering tool, we could:

> In this scheme, OID collisions are a problem for in-progress patches
> only if two patches are unlucky enough to choose the same random
> high OIDs during the same devel cycle.  That's unlikely, or at least
> a good bit less likely than collisions are today.

That sounds like a reasonable compromise. Perhaps the unused_oids
script could give specific guidance on using a randomly determined
small range of contiguous OIDs that fall within the current range for
that devel cycle. That would prevent collisions caused by the natural
human tendency to prefer a round number. Having contiguous OIDs for
the same patch seems worth preserving.

-- 
Peter Geoghegan