The idea behind this patch is to design out bugs like the one fixed
by commit 9d523119f. Previously, once one did RelationOpenSmgr(rel),
it was considered okay to access rel->rd_smgr directly for some
not-very-clear interval. But since that pointer will be cleared by
relcache flushes, we had bugs arising from overreliance on a previous
RelationOpenSmgr call still being effective.
Now, very little code except that in rel.h and relcache.c should ever
touch the rd_smgr field directly. The normal coding rule is to use
RelationGetSmgr(rel) and not expect the result to be valid for longer
than one smgr function call. There are a couple of places where using
the function every single time seemed like overkill, but they are now
annotated with large warning comments.
Amul Sul, after an idea of mine.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CANiYTQsU7yMFpQYnv=BrcRVqK_3U3mtAzAsJCaqtzsDHfsUbdQ@mail.gmail.com
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.