Some cleanups/enhancements - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

Hi,

I'm running PostgreSQL 6.3 on Linux 2.1.85 with gcc 2.8.0 and libc5. So
far no problems, however I noted some cleanups / enhancements which I
would like to do. Before I send you a bunch of patches I thought I'll
tell you what I'm planning to do. Please comment on my list and indicate
whether I should go ahead.

- Fix all Makefiles so 'make dep' and 'make depend' work
- Fix all Makefiles so 'make clean' throws away the depend file
- Some other Makefile cleanups
- gcc 2.8.0 issues some additional warnings which are very easy to fix:
  - register i --> register int i
  - Ambiguous else --> add braces:
    if (cond1)
      if (cond2)
        ...
      else
        ...
  - etc.
- Add a template for linux-elf-586 with (optimized) code for a Pentium
(gcc 2.8.0 not only supports -m486 but also -mpentium and -mpentiumpro).
Why not use template names similar to the output of config.guess (maybe
with some symbolic links)?
- Fix for tools/find_static: add two (in my opinion funny) indices to
improve speed tremendously:

Nested Loop  (cost=6.05 size=1 width=42)
  ->   Index Scan on debug  (cost=2.05 size=2 width=12)
  ->   Index Scan on debug2  (cost=2.00 size=2 width=30)

rather than

Hash Join  (cost=993.76 size=1 width=42)
  ->   Seq Scan on debug  (cost=495.81 size=2 width=12)
  ->   Hash  (cost=0.00 size=0 width=0)
    ->     Seq Scan on debug2  (cost=495.81 size=2 width=30)

- Cleanup of some code that uses heap_formtuple to allow a NULL value
for the nulls parameter, indicating there are no null columns (comes in
handy for catalog/pg_*.c), among others.
- Why is there some code to change the case of the procedural language
to lower case except for 'C' (in fact it's there twice)? Why not use
strcasecmp and remove these pices of code?
- Add pcalloc(n,s) to allocate n*s bytes and set them to zero and use
them where appropriate (I won't touch all code :-))
- Shouldn't same_tuple in executor/nodeGroup.c use the equality operator
for the type concerned to test for equality of the attributes rather
than print them to a buffer and use strcmp? Shouldn't the pointers for
these functions be looked up once in ExecInitGroup and stored somewhere?
Shouldn't this function go to heaptuple.c and be renamed heap_sametuple?
- Lump heaptuple.c and heapvalid.c together
- I also saw quite some #ifdef NOT_USED and other similar stuff. I don't
want to touch these now, but shouldn't some of these be removed soon?
- Add a pg_version function that returns a string like 'PostgreSQL 6.3'
to indicate the version of PostgreSQL a user is using (with 'select
pg_version()'). Might be handy to include in the bug reports.

These are all the things that I found after browsing through the code
one night (primarily in backend/access, backend/catalog and
backend/executor).

Let me know what you think of the above list and I will proceed. If you
have any hints on how I might proceed (especially with same_tuple)
please don't hesitate. Expect the changes to be available somewhere
after the weekend.

Cheers,

Jeroen van Vianen