process of dropping roles by dropping objects owned by them and privileges
granted to them, or giving the owned objects to someone else, through the
use of the data stored in the new pg_shdepend catalog.
Some refactoring of the GRANT/REVOKE code was needed, as well as ALTER OWNER
code. Further cleanup of code duplication in the GRANT code seems necessary.
Implemented by me after an idea from Tom Lane, who also provided various kind
of implementation advice.
Regression tests pass. Some tests for the new functionality are also added,
as well as rudimentary documentation.
the difference between checkpoints forced due to WAL segment consumption
and checkpoints forced for other reasons (such as CREATE DATABASE). Avoid
generating 'checkpoints are occurring too frequently' messages when the
checkpoint wasn't caused by WAL segment consumption. Per gripe from
Chris K-L.
and pg_auth_members. There are still many loose ends to finish in this
patch (no documentation, no regression tests, no pg_dump support for
instance). But I'm going to commit it now anyway so that Alvaro can
make some progress on shared dependencies. The catalog changes should
be pretty much done.
in the database. The old behavior (reindex system catalogs only) is now
available as REINDEX SYSTEM. I did not add the complementary REINDEX USER
case since there did not seem to be consensus for this, but it would be
trivial to add later. Per recent discussions.
to eliminate unnecessary deadlocks. This commit adds SELECT ... FOR SHARE
paralleling SELECT ... FOR UPDATE. The implementation uses a new SLRU
data structure (managed much like pg_subtrans) to represent multiple-
transaction-ID sets. When more than one transaction is holding a shared
lock on a particular row, we create a MultiXactId representing that set
of transactions and store its ID in the row's XMAX. This scheme allows
an effectively unlimited number of row locks, just as we did before,
while not costing any extra overhead except when a shared lock actually
has to be shared. Still TODO: use the regular lock manager to control
the grant order when multiple backends are waiting for a row lock.
Alvaro Herrera and Tom Lane.
indexes. Extend the macros in include/catalog/*.h to carry the info
about hand-assigned OIDs, and adjust the genbki script and bootstrap
code to make the relations actually get those OIDs. Remove the small
number of RelOid_pg_foo macros that we had in favor of a complete
set named like the catname.h and indexing.h macros. Next phase will
get rid of internal use of names for looking up catalogs and indexes;
but this completes the changes forcing an initdb, so it looks like a
good place to commit.
Along the way, I made the shared relations (pg_database etc) not be
'bootstrap' relations any more, so as to reduce the number of hardwired
entries and simplify changing those relations in future. I'm not
sure whether they ever really needed to be handled as bootstrap
relations, but it seems to work fine to not do so now.
whether or not it is a security definer. Changing a function's strictness
is required by SQL2003, and the other capabilities make sense. Also, allow
an optional RESTRICT noise word to be specified, for SQL conformance.
Some trivial regression tests added and the documentation has been
updated.
command. This is useful because we can allow truncation of tables
referenced by foreign keys, so long as the referencing table is
truncated in the same command.
Alvaro Herrera
Also performed an initial run through of upgrading our Copyright date to
extend to 2005 ... first run here was very simple ... change everything
where: grep 1996-2004 && the word 'Copyright' ... scanned through the
generated list with 'less' first, and after, to make sure that I only
picked up the right entries ...
mode see a fresh snapshot for each command in the function, rather than
using the latest interactive command's snapshot. Also, suppress fresh
snapshots as well as CommandCounterIncrement inside STABLE and IMMUTABLE
functions, instead using the snapshot taken for the most closely nested
regular query. (This behavior is only sane for read-only functions, so
the patch also enforces that such functions contain only SELECT commands.)
As per my proposal of 6-Sep-2004; I note that I floated essentially the
same proposal on 19-Jun-2002, but that discussion tailed off without any
action. Since 8.0 seems like the right place to be taking possibly
nontrivial backwards compatibility hits, let's get it done now.
rather than when returning to the idle loop. This makes no particular
difference for interactively-issued queries, but it makes a big difference
for queries issued within functions: trigger execution now occurs before
the calling function is allowed to proceed. This responds to numerous
complaints about nonintuitive behavior of foreign key checking, such as
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-bugs/2004-09/msg00020.php, and
appears to be required by the SQL99 spec.
Also take the opportunity to simplify the data structures used for the
pending-trigger list, rename them for more clarity, and squeeze out a
bit of space.
by the SQL standard. For backwards compatibility, however, continue to
accept the syntax without. Minor editorialization in the reference pages
for these commands, too.
executed. Previously, the DECLARE would succeed but subsequent FETCHes
would fail since the parameter values supplied to DECLARE were not
propagated to the portal created for the cursor.
In support of this, add type Oids to ParamListInfo entries, which seems
like a good idea anyway since code that extracts a value can double-check
that it got the type of value it was expecting.
Oliver Jowett, with minor editorialization by Tom Lane.
number of active subtransaction XIDs in each backend's PGPROC entry,
and use this to avoid expensive probes into pg_subtrans during
TransactionIdIsInProgress. Extend EOXactCallback API to allow add-on
modules to get control at subxact start/end. (This is deliberately
not compatible with the former API, since any uses of that API probably
need manual review anyway.) Add basic reference documentation for
SAVEPOINT and related commands. Minor other cleanups to check off some
of the open issues for subtransactions.
Alvaro Herrera and Tom Lane.
SAVEPOINT/RELEASE/ROLLBACK-TO syntax. (Alvaro)
Cause COMMIT of a failed transaction to report ROLLBACK instead of
COMMIT in its command tag. (Tom)
Fix a few loose ends in the nested-transactions stuff.
aggregates, conversions, functions, operators, operator classes,
schemas, types, and tablespaces. Fold the existing implementations
of alter domain owner and alter database owner in with these.
Christopher Kings-Lynne
There are various things left to do: contrib dbsize and oid2name modules
need work, and so does the documentation. Also someone should think about
COMMENT ON TABLESPACE and maybe RENAME TABLESPACE. Also initlocation is
dead, it just doesn't know it yet.
Gavin Sherry and Tom Lane.
than being random pieces of other files. Give bgwriter responsibility
for all checkpoint activity (other than a post-recovery checkpoint);
so this child process absorbs the functionality of the former transient
checkpoint and shutdown subprocesses. While at it, create an actual
include file for postmaster.c, which for some reason never had its own
file before.
It was necessary to touch in grammar and create a new node to make home
to the new syntax. The command is also supported in E
CPG. Doc updates are attached too. Only superusers can change the owner
of the database. New owners don't need any aditional
privileges.
Euler Taveira de Oliveira
In the past, we used a 'Lispy' linked list implementation: a "list" was
merely a pointer to the head node of the list. The problem with that
design is that it makes lappend() and length() linear time. This patch
fixes that problem (and others) by maintaining a count of the list
length and a pointer to the tail node along with each head node pointer.
A "list" is now a pointer to a structure containing some meta-data
about the list; the head and tail pointers in that structure refer
to ListCell structures that maintain the actual linked list of nodes.
The function names of the list API have also been changed to, I hope,
be more logically consistent. By default, the old function names are
still available; they will be disabled-by-default once the rest of
the tree has been updated to use the new API names.
* ALTER ... ADD COLUMN with defaults and NOT NULL constraints works per SQL
spec. A default is implemented by rewriting the table with the new value
stored in each row.
* ALTER COLUMN TYPE. You can change a column's datatype to anything you
want, so long as you can specify how to convert the old value. Rewrites
the table. (Possible future improvement: optimize no-op conversions such
as varchar(N) to varchar(N+1).)
* Multiple ALTER actions in a single ALTER TABLE command. You can perform
any number of column additions, type changes, and constraint additions with
only one pass over the table contents.
Basic documentation provided in ALTER TABLE ref page, but some more docs
work is needed.
Original patch from Rod Taylor, additional work from Tom Lane.
remove separate implementation of ALTER TABLE SET WITHOUT OIDS in favor
of doing a regular DROP. Also, cause CREATE TABLE to account completely
correctly for the inheritance status of the OID column. This fixes
problems with dropping OID columns that have dependencies, as noted by
Christopher Kings-Lynne, as well as making sure that you can't drop an
OID column that was inherited from a parent.
the relcache, and so the notion of 'blind write' is gone. This should
improve efficiency in bgwriter and background checkpoint processes.
Internal restructuring in md.c to remove the not-very-useful array of
MdfdVec objects --- might as well just use pointers.
Also remove the long-dead 'persistent main memory' storage manager (mm.c),
since it seems quite unlikely to ever get resurrected.
now able to cope with assigning new relfilenode values to nailed-in-cache
indexes, so they can be reindexed using the fully crash-safe method. This
leaves only shared system indexes as special cases. Remove the 'index
deactivation' code, since it provides no useful protection in the shared-
index case. Require reindexing of shared indexes to be done in standalone
mode, but remove other restrictions on REINDEX. -P (IgnoreSystemIndexes)
now prevents using indexes for lookups, but does not disable index updates.
It is therefore safe to allow from PGOPTIONS. Upshot: reindexing system catalogs
can be done without a standalone backend for all cases except
shared catalogs.
of Describe on a prepared statement. This was in the original 3.0
protocol proposal, but I took it out for reasons that seemed good at
the time. Put it back per yesterday's pghackers discussion.
DestReceiver pointers instead of just CommandDest values. The DestReceiver
is made at the point where the destination is selected, rather than
deep inside the executor. This cleans up the original kluge implementation
of tstoreReceiver.c, and makes it easy to support retrieving results
from utility statements inside portals. Thus, you can now do fun things
like Bind and Execute a FETCH or EXPLAIN command, and it'll all work
as expected (e.g., you can Describe the portal, or use Execute's count
parameter to suspend the output partway through). Implementation involves
stuffing the utility command's output into a Tuplestore, which would be
kind of annoying for huge output sets, but should be quite acceptable
for typical uses of utility commands.
Both plannable queries and utility commands are now always executed
within Portals, which have been revamped so that they can handle the
load (they used to be good only for single SELECT queries). Restructure
code to push command-completion-tag selection logic out of postgres.c,
so that it won't have to be duplicated between simple and extended queries.
initdb forced due to addition of a field to Query nodes.
Add ALTER SEQUENCE to modify min/max/increment/cache/cycle values
Also updated create sequence docs to mention NO MINVALUE, & NO MAXVALUE.
New Files:
doc/src/sgml/ref/alter_sequence.sgml
src/test/regress/expected/sequence.out
src/test/regress/sql/sequence.sql
ALTER SEQUENCE is NOT transactional. It behaves similarly to setval().
It matches the proposed SQL200N spec, as well as Oracle in most ways --
Oracle lacks RESTART WITH for some strange reason.
--
Rod Taylor <rbt@rbt.ca>
utility statement (DeclareCursorStmt) with a SELECT query dangling from
it, rather than a SELECT query with a few unusual fields in it. Add
code to determine whether a planned query can safely be run backwards.
If DECLARE CURSOR specifies SCROLL, ensure that the plan can be run
backwards by adding a Materialize plan node if it can't. Without SCROLL,
you get an error if you try to fetch backwards from a cursor that can't
handle it. (There is still some discussion about what the exact
behavior should be, but this is necessary infrastructure in any case.)
Along the way, make EXPLAIN DECLARE CURSOR work.
On Wed, 2003-01-08 at 21:59, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
> I agree. I want to remove OIDs from heaps of our tables when we go to 7.3.
> I'd rather not have to do it in the dump due to down time.
Rod Taylor <rbt@rbt.ca>
codes, per discussion from last March. parse.h should now be included
*only* by gram.y, scan.l, keywords.c, parser.c. This prevents surprising
misbehavior after seemingly-trivial grammar adjustments.
beginning/end of cursor.
Have MOVE return 0/1 depending on cursor position.
Matches SQL spec.
Pass cursor counter from parser as a long rather than int.
Doc updates.
- CLUSTER ALL clusters all the tables that have some index with
indisclustered set and the calling user owns.
- CLUSTER tablename clusters the named table, using the index with
indisclustered set. If no index has the bit set, throws elog(ERROR).
- The multi-relation version (CLUSTER ALL) uses a multitransaction
approach, similar to what VACUUM does.
Alvaro Herrera
into postgres.c; make sure it happens for all cases that seem to need it.
Perhaps it would be better to explicitly exclude just a few utility
statement types from setting a snapshot?
column additions, deletions, and renames that would let a child table
get out of sync with its parent. Patch by Alvaro Herrera, with some
kibitzing by Tom Lane.
This patch is an updated version of the lock listing patch. I've made
the following changes:
- write documentation
- wrap the SRF in a view called 'pg_locks': all user-level
access should be done through this view
- re-diff against latest CVS
One thing I chose not to do is adapt the SRF to use the anonymous
composite type code from Joe Conway. I'll probably do that eventually,
but I'm not really convinced it's a significantly cleaner way to
bootstrap SRF builtins than the method this patch uses (of course, it
has other uses...)
Neil Conway
> There's no longer a separate call to heap_storage_create in that routine
> --- the right place to make the test is now in the storage_create
> boolean parameter being passed to heap_create. A simple change, but
> it passeth patch's understanding ...
Thanks.
Attached is a patch against cvs tip as of 8:30 PM PST or so. Turned out
that even after fixing the failed hunks, there was a new spot in
bufmgr.c which needed to be fixed (related to temp relations;
RelationUpdateNumberOfBlocks). But thankfully the regression test code
caught it :-)
Joe Conway
functionality of the command is basically identical to that of
BEGIN; it just accepts a few extra options (only one of which
PostgreSQL currently implements), and is standards-compliant.
The patch includes a simple regression test and documentation.
[ Regression tests removed, per Peter.]
Neil Conway
'tioga recipes', whatever those are -- Peter E. killed most
of it a couple days ago, but this patch removes the rest. Most
of it was #ifdef'ed out anyway.
Neil Conway
documentation (xindex.sgml should be rewritten), need to teach pg_dump
about it, need to update contrib modules that currently build pg_opclass
entries by hand. Original patch by Bill Studenmund, grammar adjustments
and general update for 7.3 by Tom Lane.
extension to create binary compatible casts. Includes dependency tracking
as well.
pg_proc.proimplicit is now defunct, but will be removed in a separate
commit.
pg_dump provides a migration path from the previous scheme to declare
casts. Dumping binary compatible casts is currently impossible, though.
pg_relcheck is gone; CHECK, UNIQUE, PRIMARY KEY, and FOREIGN KEY
constraints all have real live entries in pg_constraint. pg_depend
exists, and RESTRICT/CASCADE options work on most kinds of DROP;
however, pg_depend is not yet very well populated with dependencies.
(Most of the ones that are present at this point just replace formerly
hardwired associations, such as the implicit drop of a relation's pg_type
entry when the relation is dropped.) Need to add more logic to create
dependency entries, improve pg_dump to dump constraints in place of
indexes and triggers, and add some regression tests.
This is the first cut toward CREATE CONVERSION/DROP CONVERSION implementaion.
The commands can now add/remove tuples to the new pg_conversion system
catalog, but that's all. Still need work to make them actually working.
Documentations, regression tests also need work.
RESTRICT/CASCADE syntax to the DROP commands that need it, and propagates
the behavioral option through the parser to the routines that execute
drops. Doesn't do anything useful yet, but I figured I'd commit these
changes so I could get out of the parser area while working on the rest.
GUC support. It's now possible to set datestyle, timezone, and
client_encoding from postgresql.conf and per-database or per-user
settings. Also, implement rollback of SET commands that occur in a
transaction that later fails. Create a SET LOCAL var = value syntax
that sets the variable only for the duration of the current transaction.
All per previous discussions in pghackers.
messages more uniform and internationalizable: the global array
aclcheck_error_strings[] is gone in favor of a subroutine
aclcheck_error(). Partial implementation of namespace-related
permission checks --- not all done yet.
left a stub for a future "ALTER RULE RENAME" but did not write that one
yet. Bruce, if you want to add my name for for that I'll take it and do
it later.
Joe Conway
DROP RULE and COMMENT ON RULE syntax adds an 'ON tablename' clause,
similar to TRIGGER syntaxes. To allow loading of existing pg_dump
files containing COMMENT ON RULE, the COMMENT code will still accept
the old syntax --- but only if the target rulename is unique across
the whole database.
have been divided according to the type of object manipulated - so ALTER
TABLE code is in tablecmds.c, aggregate commands in aggregatecmds.c and
so on.
A few common support routines remain in define.c (prototypes in
src/include/commands/defrem.h).
No code has been changed except for includes to reflect the new files.
The prototypes for aggregatecmds.c, functioncmds.c, operatorcmds.c,
and typecmds.c remain in src/include/commands/defrem.h.
From John Gray <jgray@azuli.co.uk>
in schemas other than the system namespace; however, there's no search
path yet, and not all operations work yet on tables outside the system
namespace.
addRangeTableEntry calls. Remove relname field from RTEs, since
it will no longer be a useful unique identifier of relations;
we want to encourage people to rely on the relation OID instead.
Further work on dumping qual expressions in EXPLAIN, too.
objects to be privilege-checked. Some change in their APIs would be
necessary no matter what in the schema environment, and simply getting
rid of the name-based interface entirely seems like the best way.
the parsetree representation. As yet we don't *do* anything with schema
names, just drop 'em on the floor; but you can enter schema-compatible
command syntax, and there's even a primitive CREATE SCHEMA command.
No doc updates yet, except to note that you can now extract a field
from a function-returning-row's result with (foo(...)).fieldname.
in the current code, the authentication logic (check user, check the
relation we're operating on, etc) is done in tcop/utility.c, whereas the
actual TRUNCATE command in done in TruncateRelation() in
commands/createinh.c (which is really just a wrapper over
heap_truncate() in catalog/heap.c). This patch moves the authentication
logic into TruncateRelation(), as well as making some minor code
cleanups.
Neil Conway
- domain.patch -> source patch against pgsql in cvs
- drop_domain.sgml and create_domain.sgml -> New doc/src/sgml/ref docs
- dominfo.txt -> basic domain related queries I used for testing
[ ADDED TO /doc]
Enables domains of array elements -> CREATE DOMAIN dom int4[3][2];
Uses a typbasetype column to describe the origin of the domain.
Copies data to attnotnull rather than processing in execMain().
Some documentation differences from earlier.
If this is approved, I'll start working on pg_dump, and a \dD <domain>
option in psql, and regression tests. I don't really feel like doing
those until the system table structure settles for pg_type.
CHECKS when added, will also be copied to to the table attributes. FK
Constraints (if I ever figure out how) will be done similarly. Both
will lbe handled by MergeDomainAttributes() which is called shortly
before MergeAttributes().
Rod Taylor
(current as of a few hours ago.)
This patch:
1. Adds PG_GETARG_xxx_P_SLICE() macros and associated support routines.
2. Adds routines in src/backend/access/tuptoaster.c for fetching only
necessary chunks of a toasted value. (Modelled on latest changes to
assume chunks are returned in order).
3. Amends text_substr and bytea_substr to use new methods. It now
handles multibyte cases -and should still lead to a performance
improvement in the multibyte case where the substring is near the
beginning of the string.
4. Added new command: ALTER TABLE tabname ALTER COLUMN colname SET
STORAGE {PLAIN | EXTERNAL | EXTENDED | MAIN} to parser and documented in
alter-table.sgml. (NB I used ColId as the item type for the storage
mode string, rather than a new production - I hope this makes sense!).
All this does is sets attstorage for the specified column.
4. AlterTableAlterColumnStatistics is now AlterTableAlterColumnFlags and
handles both statistics and storage (it uses the subtype code to
distinguish). The previous version of my patch also re-arranged other
code in backend/commands/command.c but I have dropped that from this
patch.(I plan to return to it separately).
5. Documented new macros (and also the PG_GETARG_xxx_P_COPY macros) in
xfunc.sgml. ref/alter_table.sgml also contains documentation for ALTER
COLUMN SET STORAGE.
John Gray
report for each received SQL command, regardless of rewriting activity.
Also ensure that this report comes from the 'original' command, not the
last command generated by rewrite; this fixes 7.2 breakage for INSERT
commands that have actions added by rules. Fernando Nasser and Tom Lane.
Disallow CREATE INDEX on system catalogs, non-tables (views, sequences, etc).
Disallow CREATE/DROP TRIGGER on system catalogs, non-tables.
Disallow ALTER TABLE ADD/DROP CONSTRAINT on system catalogs.
Disallow FOREIGN KEY reference to non-table.
None of these things can actually work in the present system structure,
but the code was letting them pass without complaint.
Modified the parser and the SET handlers to use full Node structures
rather than simply a character string argument.
Implement INTERVAL() YEAR TO MONTH (etc) syntax per SQL99.
Does not yet accept the goofy string format that goes along with, but
this should be fairly straight forward to fix now as a bug or later
as a feature.
Implement precision for the INTERVAL() type.
Use the typmod mechanism for both of INTERVAL features.
Fix the INTERVAL syntax in the parser:
opt_interval was in the wrong place.
INTERVAL is now a reserved word, otherwise we get reduce/reduce errors.
Implement an explicit date_part() function for TIMETZ.
Should fix coersion problem with INTERVAL reported by Peter E.
Fix up some error messages for date/time types.
Use all caps for type names within message.
Fix recently introduced side-effect bug disabling 'epoch' as a recognized
field for date_part() etc. Reported by Peter E. (??)
Bump catalog version number.
Rename "microseconds" current transaction time field
from ...Msec to ...Usec. Duh!
date/time regression tests updated for reference platform, but a few
changes will be necessary for others.
transformAlterStmt() use these routines, instead of having lots of
duplicate (not to mention should-have-been-duplicate) code.
Adding a column with a CHECK constraint actually works now,
and the tests to reject unsupported DEFAULT and NOT NULL clauses
actually fire now. ALTER TABLE ADD PRIMARY KEY works, modulo
having to have created the column(s) NOT NULL already.
We will no longer try to send elog messages to the client before we have
initialized backend libpq (oops); however, reporting bogus commandline
switches via elog does work now (not irrelevant, because of PGOPTIONS).
Fix problem with inappropriate sending of checkpoint-process messages
to stderr.
pgsql-hackers. pg_opclass now has a row for each opclass supported by each
index AM, not a row for each opclass name. This allows pg_opclass to show
directly whether an AM supports an opclass, and furthermore makes it possible
to store additional information about an opclass that might be AM-dependent.
pg_opclass and pg_amop now store "lossy" and "haskeytype" information that we
previously expected the user to remember to provide in CREATE INDEX commands.
Lossiness is no longer an index-level property, but is associated with the
use of a particular operator in a particular index opclass.
Along the way, IndexSupportInitialize now uses the syscaches to retrieve
pg_amop and pg_amproc entries. I find this reduces backend launch time by
about ten percent, at the cost of a couple more special cases in catcache.c's
IndexScanOK.
Initial work by Oleg Bartunov and Teodor Sigaev, further hacking by Tom Lane.
initdb forced.
Note: I didn't force an initdb, figuring that one today was enough.
However, there is a new function in pg_proc.h, and pg_dump won't be
able to dump partial indexes until you add that function.
for GRANT/REVOKE is now just that, not "CHANGE".
On the way, migrate some of the aclitem internal representation away from
the parser and build a real parse tree instead. Also add some 'const'
qualifiers.
a separate statement (though it can still be invoked as part of VACUUM, too).
pg_statistic redesigned to be more flexible about what statistics are
stored. ANALYZE now collects a list of several of the most common values,
not just one, plus a histogram (not just the min and max values). Random
sampling is used to make the process reasonably fast even on very large
tables. The number of values and histogram bins collected is now
user-settable via an ALTER TABLE command.
There is more still to do; the new stats are not being used everywhere
they could be in the planner. But the remaining changes for this project
should be localized, and the behavior is already better than before.
A not-very-related change is that sorting now makes use of btree comparison
routines if it can find one, rather than invoking '<' twice.
and revert documentation to describe the existing INHERITS clause
instead, per recent discussion in pghackers. Also fix implementation
of SQL_inheritance SET variable: it is not cool to look at this var
during the initial parsing phase, only during parse_analyze(). See
recent bug report concerning misinterpretation of date constants just
after a SET TIMEZONE command. gram.y really has to be an invariant
transformation of the query string to a raw parsetree; anything that
can vary with time must be done during parse analysis.
maintained for each cache entry. A cache entry will not be freed until
the matching ReleaseSysCache call has been executed. This eliminates
worries about cache entries getting dropped while still in use. See
my posting to pg-hackers of even date for more info.
cloned, rather than always cloning template1. Modify initdb to generate
two identical databases rather than one, template0 and template1.
Connections to template0 are disallowed, so that it will always remain
in its virgin as-initdb'd state. pg_dumpall now dumps databases with
restore commands that say CREATE DATABASE foo WITH TEMPLATE = template0.
This allows proper behavior when there is user-added data in template1.
initdb forced!
as well allow DROP multiple INDEX, RULE, TYPE as well. Add missing
CommandCounterIncrement to DROP loop, which could cause trouble otherwise
with multiple DROP of items affecting same catalog entries. Try to
bring a little consistency to various error messages using 'does not exist',
'nonexistent', etc --- I standardized on 'does not exist' since that's
what the vast majority of the existing uses seem to be.
