Re: BUG #7866: even after T's child-tables are deleted it cannot have select-rule

tim.romano@yahoo.com writes:
> After a table has been inherited, a select-rule cannot be created on it
> *even if its child tables are deleted and a vacuum is performed afterwards*.

This isn't a bug, it's an intentional implementation restriction.
I quote from the source code:

         * Are we converting a relation to a view?
         *
         * If so, check that the relation is empty because the storage for the
         * relation is going to be deleted.  Also insist that the rel not have
         * any triggers, indexes, or child tables.  (Note: these tests are too
         * strict, because they will reject relations that once had such but
         * don't anymore.  But we don't really care, because this whole
         * business of converting relations to views is just a kluge to allow
         * loading ancient pg_dump files.)

There is not any expectation that creating a select rule would ever
happen to anything except a freshly created table.  We'd probably not
even support the CREATE RULE syntax for this, except that pg_dump
sometimes needs to do it like that to get around circular dependencies
involving a view's rowtype.

            regards, tom lane