Re: autogenerating headers & bki stuff

On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 4:52 PM, Peter Eisentraut<peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> wrote:
> On Tuesday 30 June 2009 06:59:51 Robert Haas wrote:
>> The attached patch merges all of the logic currently in genbki.sh and
>> Gen_fmgrtab.{sh,pl} into a single script called gen_catalog.pl
>
> I can't really convince myself to like this change.  I think there is some
> merit that these scripts are separate.  I'm not sure what the combined script
> buys us except that it is a lot bigger and does everything at once instead of
> in two or three steps.
>
> That together with the big makefile moving around makes me think that this
> would cause more confusion and not much advantage.
>
> Btw., is this stamp-h business really necessary?  I guess you copied that from
> pg_config.h, but the reason there is that everything depends on pg_config.h,
> and rerunning configure would normally cause everything to be rebuilt.  The
> files we are looking at here should only change when something is edited.

It definitely has less appeal without the anum.h stuff.

I think there is some benefit in having a single script because it
means that if we want to add additional syntax in the future (like
BKI_EXECUTE or DATA_DEFAULTS or some kind of more human-readable
notation for functions or opclasses, all of which were discussed
upthread) there is only one place to change. But is that sufficient
reason to commit it at this point, given that we don't have a
fully-fleshed out design for any of those things? Not sure. Building
schemapg.h automatically seems definitely nice to me.

The stamp-h stuff is quite important for minimizing unnecessary
rebuilds. Without that, any change to any include/catalog/*.h file
will trigger a massive rebuild. With it, it only triggers a rebuild
if one of the outputs actually changes, and only for those portions
for which the output actually changed.

...Robert