Backpatch to 9.3 where src/common was introduce, because a bugfix that
needs to be backpatched, requires the function. Earlier branches will
have to duplicate the code.
This breaks the principle that common/ ought not depend on anything in the
server, not only code-wise but in the headers. The only arguable advantage
is avoidance of duplication of half a dozen extern declarations, and even
that is rather dubious, considering that the previous coding was wrong
about which declarations to duplicate: it exposed pnstrdup() to frontend
code even though no such function is provided in fe_memutils.c.
On the same principle, don't #include utils/memutils.h in the frontend
build of psprintf.c. This requires duplicating the definition of
MaxAllocSize, but that seems fine to me: there's no a-priori reason why
frontend code should use the same size limit as the backend anyway.
In passing, clean up some rather odd layout and ordering choices that
were imposed on palloc.h to reduce the number of #ifdefs required by
the previous approach.
Per gripe from Christoph Berg. There's still more work to do to make
include/common/ clean, but this part seems reasonably noncontroversial.
This enables non-backend code, such as pg_xlogdump, to use it easily.
The previous location, in src/backend/catalog/catalog.c, made that
essentially impossible because that file depends on many backend-only
facilities; so this needs to live separately.
libpgcommon is a new static library to allow sharing code among the
various frontend programs and backend; this lets us eliminate duplicate
implementations of common routines. We avoid libpgport, because that's
intended as a place for porting issues; per discussion, it seems better
to keep them separate.
The first use case, and the only implemented by this patch, is pg_malloc
and friends, which many frontend programs were already using.
At the same time, we can use this to provide palloc emulation functions
for the frontend; this way, some palloc-using files in the backend can
also be used by the frontend cleanly. To do this, we change palloc() in
the backend to be a function instead of a macro on top of
MemoryContextAlloc(). This was previously believed to cause loss of
performance, but this implementation has been tweaked by Tom and Andres
so that on modern compilers it provides a slight improvement over the
previous one.
This lets us clean up some places that were already with
localized hacks.
Most of the pg_malloc/palloc changes in this patch were authored by
Andres Freund. Zoltán Böszörményi also independently provided a form of
that. libpgcommon infrastructure was authored by Álvaro.
