The previous coding labeled expressions such as pg_index.indkey[1:3] as
being of int2vector type; which is not right because the subscript bounds
of such a result don't, in general, satisfy the restrictions of int2vector.
To fix, implicitly promote the result of slicing int2vector to int2[],
or oidvector to oid[]. This is similar to what we've done with domains
over arrays, which is a good analogy because these types are very much
like restricted domains of the corresponding regular-array types.
A side-effect is that we now also forbid array-element updates on such
columns, eg while "update pg_index set indkey[4] = 42" would have worked
before if you were superuser (and corrupted your catalogs irretrievably,
no doubt) it's now disallowed. This seems like a good thing since, again,
some choices of subscripting would've led to results not satisfying the
restrictions of int2vector. The case of an array-slice update was
rejected before, though with a different error message than you get now.
We could make these cases work in future if we added a cast from int2[]
to int2vector (with a cast function checking the subscript restrictions)
but it seems unlikely that there's any value in that.
Per report from Ronan Dunklau. Back-patch to all supported branches
because of the crash risks involved.
45e02e3232