Peter Eisentraut <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Robert Treat writes: >> One idea I've always thought would be nice would be to make full fledged >> C functions out of the \ commands and ship them with the database.
> The psql meta-commands are not a nicely designed set of queries that one > would encapsulate into a public library interface. They are created for > interactive use, representing precomposed views of the database that are > thought to be useful. If the ideas of usefulness change, then the > commands might change. I think that the proposal is to take describe.c more or less lock-stock-and-barrel out of psql and put it in the backend instead. It doesn't matter whether the views are orthogonal or useful for non-interactive purposes; they're defined to do whatever we think psql should show. The question is whether this gives us a useful amount of decoupling of psql from the backend version. Certainly the describe.c code is the stuff most subject to breakage across versions, but there are a lot of other aspects of psql that could still break. One fairly obvious example of backend-dependent psql code that won't be helped this way is the tab completion code. While I don't have any strong objection to moving the guts of these queries to the backend, I can't get real excited about it either; I suspect that psql will still be pretty version-dependent. regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: subscribe and unsubscribe commands go to [EMAIL PROTECTED]