"Tom Lane" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Gregory Stark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> "Tom Lane" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >>> I can't say that I find this a nice clean solution; but does anyone have >>> a better one? > >> I'm thinking instead of having struct varlena (which you're not allowed to >> safely use any members of anyways) we should just have a typedef to void*. > > I don't think we could imagine eliminating the struct name, especially > not as a back-patchable solution; there would be too many random > breakages.
Yeah, I wasn't thinking to backpatch that. > It might work to change struct varlena's contents to something like > > char vl_len_[4]; /* Do not touch this field directly! */ > char vl_dat[1]; > > so that the compiler wouldn't see it as necessarily having more than > 1-byte alignment. This would also not break any existing code that is > following the rules (touching vl_dat has never been stated to be > verboten). Oh, that would probably fix this problem pretty well. Touching vl_dat is only safe if you've either just allocated the object yourself or you've already detoasted it. In which case we could be using a struct pointer. But if you have a plain old varlena which might be toasted or the return value from GETARG_TEXT_PP then it doesn't make a lot of sense to have a struct pointer at all. -- Gregory Stark EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com Ask me about EnterpriseDB's PostGIS support! ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 7: You can help support the PostgreSQL project by donating at http://www.postgresql.org/about/donate
