Historically we've put type "char" into the S (String) typcategory,
although calling it a string is a stretch considering it can only
store one byte. (In our actual usage, it's more like an enum.)
This choice now seems wrong in view of the special heuristics
that parse_func.c and parse_coerce.c have for TYPCATEGORY_STRING:
it's not a great idea for "char" to have those preferential casting
behaviors.
Worse than that, recent patches inventing special-purpose types
like pg_node_tree have assigned typcategory S to those types,
meaning they also get preferential casting treatment that's designed
on the assumption that they can hold arbitrary text.
To fix, invent a new category TYPCATEGORY_INTERNAL for internal-use
types, and assign that to all these types. I used code 'Z' for
lack of a better idea ('I' was already taken).
This change breaks one query in psql/describe.c, which now needs to
explicitly cast a catalog "char" column to text before concatenating
it with an undecorated literal. Also, a test case in contrib/citext
now needs an explicit cast to convert citext to "char". Since the
point of this change is to not have "char" be a surprisingly-available
cast target, these breakages seem OK.
Per report from Ian Campbell.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/2216388.1638480141@sss.pgh.pa.us
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 "make all" and "make
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.
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