Re: Do we need use more meaningful variables to replace 0 in catalog head files?

I think you've fundamentally missed the point here.  A data dump from a
table would be semantically indistinguishable from the lots-o-DATA-lines
representation we have now.  What we want is something that isn't that.
In particular I don't see how that would let us have any extra level of
abstraction that's not present in the finished form of the catalog tables.

I'm not very impressed with the suggestion of making a competing product
part of our build dependencies, either. 

If we wanted to get into build
dependency circularities, we could consider using a PG database in this
way ... but I prefer to leave such headaches to compiler authors for whom
it comes with the territory.