On reflection this method seems to be exposing an unreasonable amount of
implementation detail. It wouldn't matter when talking to a remote server
of the identical Postgres version, but it seems likely to make things worse
not better if the remote is a different version with different casting
infrastructure. Instead adopt ruleutils.c's policy of regurgitating the
cast as it was originally specified; including not showing it at all, if
it was implicit to start with. (We must do that because for some datatypes
explicit and implicit casts have different semantics.)
The PostgreSQL contrib tree
---------------------------
This subtree contains porting tools, analysis utilities, and plug-in
features that are not part of the core PostgreSQL system, mainly
because they address a limited audience or are too experimental to be
part of the main source tree. This does not preclude their
usefulness.
User documentation for each module appears in the main SGML
documentation.
When building from the source distribution, these modules are not
built automatically, unless you build the "world" target. You can
also build and install them all by running "gmake all" and "gmake
install" in this directory; or to build and install just one selected
module, do the same in that module's subdirectory.
Some directories supply new user-defined functions, operators, or
types. To make use of one of these modules, after you have installed
the code you need to register the new SQL objects in the database
system by executing a CREATE EXTENSION command. In a fresh database,
you can simply do
CREATE EXTENSION module_name;
See the PostgreSQL documentation for more information about this
procedure.