Re: Collation & ctype method table, and extension hooks

On Sun, 2025-06-29 at 12:43 +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> I wish we could take this further and also run the "ctype is c" case
> through the method table.  Right now, there are still a bunch of
> open-coded special cases all over the place, which could be unified. 
> I
> guess this isn't any worse than before, but maybe this could be a
> future
> project?

+1. A few things need to be sorted out, but I don't see any major
problem with that.

> Patch 0003 I don't understand.  It replaces type safety by no type
> safety, and it doesn't have any explanation or comments.  I suppose
> you
> have further plans in this direction, but until we have seen those
> and
> have more clarification and explanation, I would hold this back.

Part of it is simply #include cleanliness, because we can't do v16-0004
if we have the provider-specific details in the union. I don't really
like the idea of including ICU headers (indirectly) so many places.
Another part is that I'd like to abstract the providers more completely
-- I've alluded to that a few times but I haven't made an independent
proposal for that yet. Also, the union doesn't offer a lot of type
safety, so I don't see it as a big loss.

But it's not critical right now either, so I won't push for it.

> Patch 0004 seems ok.  But maybe you could explain this better in the
> commit message, like remove includes from pg_locale.h but instead put
> them in the .c files as needed, and explain why this is possible or
> suitable now.

It goes with v16-0003, so I will hold this back for now as well.

Regards,
    Jeff Davis