On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 2:12 PM, Tom Lane<t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > The main point here is that we have a pretty good idea of what > general-purpose client code is likely to want to do with the data, and > in a lot of cases that does not translate to having to know each node > type explicitly, so long as it can be categorized.
I agree. I'm just not seeing the need for an *explicit* categorization contained within the data itself. For one thing, AIUI, that's the job of things like an XML Schema, which Andres Freund has already agreed to write, and I would expect that would be of some value to tool-writers, else why are we creating it? I also think scalars and lists are recognizable without any particular additional markup at all, just by introspection of the contents. Even if we do need some kind of additional markup, I'm reluctant to try to design it without some feedback from people writing actual tools about what they find inadequate in the current output. The good news is that if this patch gets committed fairly quickly after the release of 8.4, tool authors should have enough time to discover where any bodies are buried in time to fix them before 8.5. But I'm really unconvinced that any of this minor formatting stuff is going to rise to the level of a real problem. ...Robert -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
