Re: collations in shared catalogs?

Andres Freund <andres(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> On 2015-02-25 12:08:32 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Andrew Gierth <andrew(at)tao11(dot)riddles(dot)org(dot)uk> writes:
>>> So while helping someone with an unrelated issue, I did a quick query to
>>> look for collation-dependent indexes, and was rather shocked to find
>>> that not only are there two such in the system catalogs, both set to
>>> "default" collation, but that one of them is in a _shared_ catalog
>>> (pg_shseclabel).
>>> How did that happen? And how could it possibly work?

>> It probably doesn't, and the reason nobody has noticed is that the
>> security label stuff has fewer users than I have fingers (and those
>> people aren't using provider names that would cause anything interesting
>> to happen).
>>
>> The most obvious fix is to change "provider" to a NAME column.

> Yea. I'm not sure why that wasn't done initially.

OK, now I'm on the warpath, because I went to fix this and discovered
that since that discussion, somebody named Freund committed yet another
shared catalog with a collation-dependent index. This time, at least,
we can fix it *before* it gets into the wild.

Is it okay to change pg_replication_origin.roname to type "name",
and if not what do you want to do instead?

While I'm looking at it, why in the world have roident and not just a
standard system OID column? This catalog seems willfully ignorant of
Postgres conventions.

regards, tom lane