Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> writes:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> Don't ask me why SM_USER is different from the rest :-(
>>
>> If you change these I'd strongly advise bumping the protocol minor
>> version number, so that you don't have weird behavior should you try
>> to interoperate with standard code.
>>
>> This is another thing that should be on the list of stuff to fix when
>> we next change the FE/BE protocol ...
> Comment added to source that SM_USER length should match the others.
Actually, I had no such change in mind. IMHO the right fix is to
eliminate the fixed-width fields entirely. I see no good reason why
the startup packet shouldn't be several null-terminated strings with
no presupposed lengths. In most cases that would actually make the
packet shorter than it is now.
We'd probably want an overall sanity-check limit on the packet size,
but it could be of the order of 10K without any problem that I could
see.
regards, tom lane