Alvaro Herrera <alvhe...@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> A difficulty with either your patch or my idea is that they require adding
>> another field to ExplainState, which is an ABI break for any third-party
>> code that might be declaring variables of that struct type.  That's fine
>> for HEAD but would be risky to back-patch.  Any thoughts about whether we
>> can get away with that (ie, anybody have an idea if there are third-party
>> extensions that call explain.c)?

> codesearch.debian.net shows a couple of hits for ExplainState in
> multicorn (an extension for FDW from Python data sources); I didn't look
> but it seems that the FDW API is using that struct.

It is, but FDWs are not at risk here: they merely reference ExplainStates
that were allocated by core backend code.  So as long as we add the new
field at the end it's not a problem for them.  Problematic usage would be
like what auto_explain does:

            ExplainState es;

            ExplainInitState(&es);
            ...

In hindsight, that's a bad API and we should change it to something like

            ExplainState *es = NewExplainState();

so that the sizeof the struct isn't embedded in extension code.  But we
definitely can't do that in back branches.

                        regards, tom lane


-- 
Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org)
To make changes to your subscription:
http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers

Reply via email to