Re: Poorly named support routines for GIN tsearch index opclasses

I've just noticed that tsearch includes a couple of support functions
with rather vague names:
gin_extract_query(internal,internal,smallint)
gin_ts_consistent(internal,smallint,internal)
These are, in fact, specialized to the case of operating on tsquery
inputs, but you'd never guess that from either the name or the
declared argument types. The first one seems particularly likely
to conflict with other peoples' GIN opclasses, down the road sometime.

Since we've already forced initdb for the next beta, it would be "free"
to rename these things now. I don't believe this would cause any
compatibility problems for applications, since SQL queries never call
these things directly. I'm thinking "gin_extract_tsquery" and
"gin_tsquery_consistent" would be suitable names.

Another possibility would be to change the declared signatures to show
"tsquery" rather than "internal" at the places where a tsquery argument
is expected. I'm less excited about that part though.

Comments, objections?

regards, tom lane

"Tom Lane" <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:

> Another possibility would be to change the declared signatures to show
> "tsquery" rather than "internal" at the places where a tsquery argument
> is expected. I'm less excited about that part though.

The use of "internal" arguments has always been the part of GIN/GIST which
bothered me the most. Most of those instances are actually quite necessary but
if there are some that aren't I'm all for removing them.

The only thing is that this has a semantic effect. It means users will be able
to call these functions from SQL directly. Are they safe to allow this? Is
this useful?

--
Gregory Stark
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com
Ask me about EnterpriseDB's On-Demand Production Tuning

Gregory Stark <stark(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
> "Tom Lane" <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:
>> Another possibility would be to change the declared signatures to show
>> "tsquery" rather than "internal" at the places where a tsquery argument
>> is expected. I'm less excited about that part though.

> The only thing is that this has a semantic effect. It means users will
> be able to call these functions from SQL directly. Are they safe to
> allow this? Is this useful?

No, no, and no, because there will still be at least one "internal"
argument. I'm just suggesting that the argument positions that do
correspond to ordinary SQL types should be declared that way, as an
extra way of distinguishing these support functions from others for
other opclasses.

regards, tom lane