Re: split TOAST support out of postgres.h

On Wed, Jan 11, 2023 at 1:14 AM Noah Misch <noah(at)leadboat(dot)com> wrote:
> If the patch had just made postgres.h include varatt.h, like it does elog.h,
> I'd consider that change a nonnegative. Grouping things is nice, even if it
> makes compilation a bit slower. That also covers your frontend use case. How
> about that?

I'm not direly opposed to that, but I'm also unconvinced that having
the varatt.h stuff is important enough relative to other things to
justify giving it a privileged place forever.

> I agree fixing any one extension is easy enough. Thinking back to the
> htup_details.h refactor, I found the aggregate pain unreasonable relative to
> alleged benefits, even though each individual extension wasn't too bad.
> SET_VARSIZE is used more (74 pgxn distributions) than htup_details.h (62).

What annoyed me about that refactoring is that, in most cases where I
had been including htup.h, I had to change it to include
htup_details.h. In the main source tree, too, we've got 31 places that
include access/htup.h and 241 that include access/htup_details.h. It's
hard to argue that it was worth splitting the file given those
numbers, and in fact I think that change was a mistake. But that
doesn't mean every such change is a mistake.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com