Bruce Momjian <maillist@candle.pha.pa.us> writes:
>> [ several of us like making SERIAL a new data type ]
> My guess is that 6.5 is too close to be making such sweeping changes,
I agree, we should probably not expect to squeeze such a change in for
6.5.
Although we've been hand-waving about how this could be done, I think
it would require either ugly hackery or some nontrivial extensions to
the system. AFAIR, for example, there is no data-type-specific code
that gets executed when NULL is assigned to a column, therefore no
easy way for a SERIAL data type to get control and substitute a suitable
default value. Probably we'd end up still having to use a "DEFAULT"
clause to make that happen. It seems to need some thought, anyway.
regards, tom lane