Hi,
I'm very new to this list -- I've been using and advocating PostgreSQL for no less than 4 or 5 years now, and have participated in some of the other mailing lists, but never on this one. My question is (short version): how would one go about adding a new (built-in) function to PostgreSQL? Long-ish version: I know the answer "in theory" -- one goes through the source code, find out how it all works, and modify/add the code to add or fix whatever feature we want. I guess my point in here would be rather a "feature request" -- except that I'd find it pretty exciting to implement it myself, and then propose the new feature by volunteering the implementation that I already wrote (seems like the spirit of open-source communities, right?) -- then of course, it would be subject to consensus, whether or not the feature makes sense and the implementation is good enough. I'm interested in adding additional hash functions -- PG supports, as part of the built-in SQL functions, MD5 hashing. So, for instance, I can simply type, at a psql console, the following: select md5('abc'); My "feature request" (which again, I'd like to implement it myself) would be the ability to do: select sha1('xyz'), sha256('etc'); (At least these two -- maybe for completeness it would be good to have sha224, 384, and 512, but I guess SHA1 and SHA-256 would be a very good and sound starting point) So, can you offer some advice or pointers on how to go about that? I started by doing a search for the string md5 through all the source code -- the problem is, md5 shows up in many many many places (it is part of the authentication protocol, among other things), so I got a little bit lost searching through it all. I wonder if you have some documents specifically aimed at providing advice and documentation for prospective developers (or for people that want to "tweak" the source code to fix/tuneup or add functionality), I guess that would be great for me in this case. Thanks! Carlos -- ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: explain analyze is your friend