Re: WIP: a way forward on bootstrap data

Greg Stark <stark@mit.edu> writes:
> I'm 1000% on board with replacing oid constants with symbolic names
> that get substituted programmatically.

Yeah, that's almost an independent feature --- we could do that without
any of this other stuff, if we wanted.

> However I wonder why we're bothering inventing a new syntax that
> doesn't actually do much more than present static tabular data. If
> things like magic proname->prosrc behaviour are not valuable then
> we're not getting much out of this perl-friendly syntax that a simpler
> more standard format wouldn't get us.

TBH, the thing that was really drawing my ire about that was that John was
inventing random special rules and documenting them *noplace* except for
the guts of some perl code.  If I have to read perl code to find out what
the catalog data means, I'm going to be bitching loudly.  That could be
done better --- one obvious idea is to add a comment to the relevant .h
file, next to the field whose value will be implicitly calculated.

> So just as a straw man proposal.... What if we just replaced the data
> file with a csv file that could be maintained in a spreadsheet.

Bleah --- that's no better than what we have today, just different.
And "maintained in a spreadsheet" doesn't sound attractive to me;
you'd almost certainly lose comments, for instance.

            regards, tom lane