Contributing with code

Hi,

This is my first post on the list. My name is Antonio. I am a CS grad
student and my field of study is about databases and information retrieval.
To get some practical knowledge, I've been studying Postgresql codebase for
a while.

Now I would like to contribute with some code and I've chosen the following
topic of the TODO list :

Allow reporting of which objects are in which tablespaces

This item is difficult because a tablespace can contain objects from
multiple databases. There is a server-side function that returns the
databases which use a specific tablespace, so this requires a tool that
will call that function and connect to each database to find the objects in
each database for that tablespace.
The topic suggests to use the pg_tablespace_databases to discover which
database is using a specific tablespace and then connect to each database
and find the objects in the tablespaces.
I checked the code of pg_tablespace_databases, defined in
src/backend/utils/adt/misc.c, and see that it uses a much simpler approach
: It just reads the tablespaces directories and return the name of the
directories that represents databases OIDs.
Although the function works as expected, I can see some issues not
addressed in the code :
- It does not check for permissions. Any user can execute it;- It does not
check if the platform supports symlinks, which can cause an error because
the function is trying to follow the links defined in base/pg_tblspc.
I could use the same approach and write a function that goes down one more
level in the directory structure and find the objects' OIDs inside each
database directory, but I don't know if this is the better way to do that.
Please, could someone give me feedback and help me with this topic ?
Regards,Antonio Belloni