Re: pgsql: Remove BufFile's isTemp flag.

On Fri, Nov 17, 2017 at 8:23 AM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> We should flat-out remove the function, since this change makes it
> impossible to resurrect with its old semantics. I wonder whether
> we should then rename BufFileCreateTemp to just BufFileCreate,
> since it's no longer possible to have a BufFile that isn't temp.
> I suspect that some attention to the comments might be needed too.

+1

> Or maybe we should revert 11e264517. It doesn't seem to be buying
> much to make up for the loss of flexibility.

Thomas wrote code that makes it possible to extend individual BufFiles
with other BufFiles across backends. This code will be used by
parallel CREATE INDEX, though it is something included in recent
versions of his parallel hash join patchset. This process happens at a
higher level than buffile.c, and should get the tricky details of
resource management right.

I think it's likely that this will be committed for v11.

--
Peter Geoghegan