Thread

Re: Include extension path on pg_available_extensions

Matheus Alcantara <matheusssilv97@gmail.com> — 2025-11-10T22:48:03Z

Thank you for reviewing this!

On Mon Nov 10, 2025 at 3:25 PM -03, Manni Wood wrote:
> Hello!
>
> I have a small bikeshedding comment around making "location" the 4th column
> returned for "select * from pg_available_extensions", as opposed to leaving
> "comment" the 4th column returned for "select * from
> pg_available_extensions".
>
> If a bit of software runs "select * from pg_available_extensions" and
> fetches the contents of the 4th column, that column will return "comment"
> for current versions of postgres but "location" for patched versions of
> postgres.
>
> In many ways, this could be considered a feature and not a bug, because we
> should be encouraged to write our SQL like so:
>
> select name, default_version, installed_version, comment from
> pg_available_extensions
>
> and not like so:
>
> select * from pg_available_extensions
>
> I'm curious to know if this is a legitimate consideration or not.
>
> Also, there were no surprises when I compiled and tested this: the location
> shows correctly for a superuser, and "<insufficient privilege>" shows
> correctly for a non-superuser.
>
Good point, I think that it's a legitimate consideration. That being
said I would get back to prefer to keep the location as the latest
column to avoid such issues even if SELECT * is not something that users
should do in practice, but I think that it's worth to avoid break any
application with such change.


-- 
Matheus Alcantara
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com