> FWIW, I don't see the issue as "internal vs external" at all. What's
> bothering me is whether these views can be considered sufficiently
> more stable and better designed than the physical system catalogs
> to justify recommending that application designers should rely on
> the views instead of the catalogs. That point doesn't seem to me
> to have been proven. The recent arguments in favor seem to boil down
to
> "novices will find these easier to use", which is very possibly true,
> but novices don't have the same needs as programs.
Argument 2: they can be dropped or modified. A few weeks ago I was
complaining about non-priv users being able to see all my source code in
pg_proc. Problem solved. Now I can totally shut down pgAdmin for a
class of users if I desire (and I do).
Argument 3: backwards compatibility. Do you remember how tablespaces
introduction broke pgAdmin?
Merlin