When using the following functions, users could see various types of
errors of the type "cache lookup failed for OID XXX" with elog(), that
can only be used for internal errors:
* pg_describe_object()
* pg_identify_object()
* pg_identify_object_as_address()
The set of APIs managing object addresses for all object types are made
smarter by gaining a new argument "missing_ok" that allows any caller to
control if an error is raised or not on an undefined object. The SQL
functions listed above are changed to handle the case where an object is
missing.
Regression tests are added for all object types for the cases where
these are undefined. Before this commit, these cases failed with cache
lookup errors, and now they basically return NULL (minus the name of the
object type requested).
Author: Michael Paquier
Reviewed-by: Aleksander Alekseev, Dmitry Dolgov, Daniel Gustafsson,
Álvaro Herrera, Kyotaro Horiguchi
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAB7nPqSZxrSmdHK-rny7z8mi=EAFXJ5J-0RbzDw6aus=wB5azQ@mail.gmail.com
There are a number of Remove${Something}ById() functions that are
essentially identical in structure and only different in which catalog
they are working on. Refactor this to be one generic function. The
information about which oid column, index, etc. to use was already
available in ObjectProperty for most catalogs, in a few cases it was
easily added.
Reviewed-by: Pavel Stehule <pavel.stehule@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/331d9661-1743-857f-1cbb-d5728bcd62cb%402ndquadrant.com
The reasons why event triggers are disabled in standalone mode are
documented in the code path of ddl_command_start, and other places
checking if standalone mode is enabled or not mention to refer to the
comment for ddl_command_start, except for table_rewrite that duplicated
the same explanation.
Reported-by: David G. Johnston
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAKFQuwYqHtXpvr2mBJRwH9f+Y5y1GXw3rhbaAu0Dk2MoNevsmA@mail.gmail.com
Includes some manual cleanup of places that pgindent messed up,
most of which weren't per project style anyway.
Notably, it seems some people didn't absorb the style rules of
commit c9d297751, because there were a bunch of new occurrences
of function calls with a newline just after the left paren, all
with faulty expectations about how the rest of the call would get
indented.
Our usual practice for "poor man's enum" catalog columns is to define
macros for the possible values and use those, not literal constants,
in C code. But for some reason lost in the mists of time, this was
never done for typalign/attalign or typstorage/attstorage. It's never
too late to make it better though, so let's do that.
The reason I got interested in this right now is the need to duplicate
some uses of the TYPSTORAGE constants in an upcoming ALTER TYPE patch.
But in general, this sort of change aids greppability and readability,
so it's a good idea even without any specific motivation.
I may have missed a few places that could be converted, and it's even
more likely that pending patches will re-introduce some hard-coded
references. But that's not fatal --- there's no expectation that
we'd actually change any of these values. We can clean up stragglers
over time.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/16457.1583189537@sss.pgh.pa.us
The backend was using strings to represent command tags and doing string
comparisons in multiple places, but that's slow and unhelpful. Create a
new command list with a supporting structure to use instead; this is
stored in a tag-list-file that can be tailored to specific purposes with
a caller-definable C macro, similar to what we do for WAL resource
managers. The first first such uses are a new CommandTag enum and a
CommandTagBehavior struct.
Replace numerous occurrences of char *completionTag with a
QueryCompletion struct so that the code no longer stores information
about completed queries in a cstring. Only at the last moment, in
EndCommand(), does this get converted to a string.
EventTriggerCacheItem no longer holds an array of palloc’d tag strings
in sorted order, but rather just a Bitmapset over the CommandTags.
Author: Mark Dilger, with unsolicited help from Álvaro Herrera
Reviewed-by: John Naylor, Tom Lane
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/981A9DB4-3F0C-4DA5-88AD-CB9CFF4D6CAD@enterprisedb.com
We used to strategically place newlines after some function call left
parentheses to make pgindent move the argument list a few chars to the
left, so that the whole line would fit under 80 chars. However,
pgindent no longer does that, so the newlines just made the code
vertically longer for no reason. Remove those newlines, and reflow some
of those lines for some extra naturality.
Reviewed-by: Michael Paquier, Tom Lane
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20200129200401.GA6303@alvherre.pgsql
This gives an alternative way of catching exceptions, for the common
case where the cleanup code is the same in the error and non-error
cases. So instead of
PG_TRY();
{
... code that might throw ereport(ERROR) ...
}
PG_CATCH();
{
cleanup();
PG_RE_THROW();
}
PG_END_TRY();
cleanup();
one can write
PG_TRY();
{
... code that might throw ereport(ERROR) ...
}
PG_FINALLY();
{
cleanup();
}
PG_END_TRY();
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/95a822c3-728b-af0e-d7e5-71890507ae0c%402ndquadrant.com
These were introduced by pgindent due to fixe to broken
indentation (c.f. 8255c7a5ee). Previously the mis-indentation of
function prototypes was creatively used to reduce indentation in a few
places.
As that formatting only exists in master and REL_12_STABLE, it seems
better to fix it in both, rather than having some odd indentation in
v12 that somebody might copy for future patches or such.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20190728013754.jwcbe5nfyt3533vx@alap3.anarazel.de
Backpatch: 12-
Before this change FunctionCallInfoData, the struct arguments etc for
V1 function calls are stored in, always had space for
FUNC_MAX_ARGS/100 arguments, storing datums and their nullness in two
arrays. For nearly every function call 100 arguments is far more than
needed, therefore wasting memory. Arg and argnull being two separate
arrays also guarantees that to access a single argument, two
cachelines have to be touched.
Change the layout so there's a single variable-length array with pairs
of value / isnull. That drastically reduces memory consumption for
most function calls (on x86-64 a two argument function now uses
64bytes, previously 936 bytes), and makes it very likely that argument
value and its nullness are on the same cacheline.
Arguments are stored in a new NullableDatum struct, which, due to
padding, needs more memory per argument than before. But as usually
far fewer arguments are stored, and individual arguments are cheaper
to access, that's still a clear win. It's likely that there's other
places where conversion to NullableDatum arrays would make sense,
e.g. TupleTableSlots, but that's for another commit.
Because the function call information is now variable-length
allocations have to take the number of arguments into account. For
heap allocations that can be done with SizeForFunctionCallInfoData(),
for on-stack allocations there's a new LOCAL_FCINFO(name, nargs) macro
that helps to allocate an appropriately sized and aligned variable.
Some places with stack allocation function call information don't know
the number of arguments at compile time, and currently variably sized
stack allocations aren't allowed in postgres. Therefore allow for
FUNC_MAX_ARGS space in these cases. They're not that common, so for
now that seems acceptable.
Because of the need to allocate FunctionCallInfo of the appropriate
size, older extensions may need to update their code. To avoid subtle
breakages, the FunctionCallInfoData struct has been renamed to
FunctionCallInfoBaseData. Most code only references FunctionCallInfo,
so that shouldn't cause much collateral damage.
This change is also a prerequisite for more efficient expression JIT
compilation (by allocating the function call information on the stack,
allowing LLVM to optimize it away); previously the size of the call
information caused problems inside LLVM's optimizer.
Author: Andres Freund
Reviewed-By: Tom Lane
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20180605172952.x34m5uz6ju6enaem@alap3.anarazel.de
Most of these had been obsoleted by 568d4138c / the SnapshotNow
removal.
This is is preparation for moving most of tqual.[ch] into either
snapmgr.h or heapam.h, which in turn is in preparation for pluggable
table AMs.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20180703070645.wchpu5muyto5n647@alap3.anarazel.de
heapam.h previously was included in a number of widely used
headers (e.g. execnodes.h, indirectly in executor.h, ...). That's
problematic on its own, as heapam.h contains a lot of low-level
details that don't need to be exposed that widely, but becomes more
problematic with the upcoming introduction of pluggable table storage
- it seems inappropriate for heapam.h to be included that widely
afterwards.
heapam.h was largely only included in other headers to get the
HeapScanDesc typedef (which was defined in heapam.h, even though
HeapScanDescData is defined in relscan.h). The better solution here
seems to be to just use the underlying struct (forward declared where
necessary). Similar for BulkInsertState.
Another problem was that LockTupleMode was used in executor.h - parts
of the file tried to cope without heapam.h, but due to the fact that
it indirectly included it, several subsequent violations of that goal
were not not noticed. We could just reuse the approach of declaring
parameters as int, but it seems nicer to move LockTupleMode to
lockoptions.h - that's not a perfect location, but also doesn't seem
bad.
As a number of files relied on implicitly included heapam.h, a
significant number of files grew an explicit include. It's quite
probably that a few external projects will need to do the same.
Author: Andres Freund
Reviewed-By: Alvaro Herrera
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20190114000701.y4ttcb74jpskkcfb@alap3.anarazel.de
Previously tables declared WITH OIDS, including a significant fraction
of the catalog tables, stored the oid column not as a normal column,
but as part of the tuple header.
This special column was not shown by default, which was somewhat odd,
as it's often (consider e.g. pg_class.oid) one of the more important
parts of a row. Neither pg_dump nor COPY included the contents of the
oid column by default.
The fact that the oid column was not an ordinary column necessitated a
significant amount of special case code to support oid columns. That
already was painful for the existing, but upcoming work aiming to make
table storage pluggable, would have required expanding and duplicating
that "specialness" significantly.
WITH OIDS has been deprecated since 2005 (commit ff02d0a05280e0).
Remove it.
Removing includes:
- CREATE TABLE and ALTER TABLE syntax for declaring the table to be
WITH OIDS has been removed (WITH (oids[ = true]) will error out)
- pg_dump does not support dumping tables declared WITH OIDS and will
issue a warning when dumping one (and ignore the oid column).
- restoring an pg_dump archive with pg_restore will warn when
restoring a table with oid contents (and ignore the oid column)
- COPY will refuse to load binary dump that includes oids.
- pg_upgrade will error out when encountering tables declared WITH
OIDS, they have to be altered to remove the oid column first.
- Functionality to access the oid of the last inserted row (like
plpgsql's RESULT_OID, spi's SPI_lastoid, ...) has been removed.
The syntax for declaring a table WITHOUT OIDS (or WITH (oids = false)
for CREATE TABLE) is still supported. While that requires a bit of
support code, it seems unnecessary to break applications / dumps that
do not use oids, and are explicit about not using them.
The biggest user of WITH OID columns was postgres' catalog. This
commit changes all 'magic' oid columns to be columns that are normally
declared and stored. To reduce unnecessary query breakage all the
newly added columns are still named 'oid', even if a table's column
naming scheme would indicate 'reloid' or such. This obviously
requires adapting a lot code, mostly replacing oid access via
HeapTupleGetOid() with access to the underlying Form_pg_*->oid column.
The bootstrap process now assigns oids for all oid columns in
genbki.pl that do not have an explicit value (starting at the largest
oid previously used), only oids assigned later by oids will be above
FirstBootstrapObjectId. As the oid column now is a normal column the
special bootstrap syntax for oids has been removed.
Oids are not automatically assigned during insertion anymore, all
backend code explicitly assigns oids with GetNewOidWithIndex(). For
the rare case that insertions into the catalog via SQL are called for
the new pg_nextoid() function can be used (which only works on catalog
tables).
The fact that oid columns on system tables are now normal columns
means that they will be included in the set of columns expanded
by * (i.e. SELECT * FROM pg_class will now include the table's oid,
previously it did not). It'd not technically be hard to hide oid
column by default, but that'd mean confusing behavior would either
have to be carried forward forever, or it'd cause breakage down the
line.
While it's not unlikely that further adjustments are needed, the
scope/invasiveness of the patch makes it worthwhile to get merge this
now. It's painful to maintain externally, too complicated to commit
after the code code freeze, and a dependency of a number of other
patches.
Catversion bump, for obvious reasons.
Author: Andres Freund, with contributions by John Naylor
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20180930034810.ywp2c7awz7opzcfr@alap3.anarazel.de
This allows the compiler / linker to mark affected pages as read-only.
There's other cases, but they're a bit more invasive, and should go
through some review. These are easy.
They were found with
objdump -j .data -t src/backend/postgres|awk '{print $4, $5, $6}'|sort -r|less
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20181015200754.7y7zfuzsoux2c4ya@alap3.anarazel.de
gcc 6.3 does not whine about this mistake I made in 39808e8868 but
evidently lots of other compilers do, according to Michael Paquier,
Peter Eisentraut, Arthur Zakirov, Tomas Vondra.
Discussion: too many to list
Index DDL cascading on partitioned tables introduced a way for ALTER
TABLE to be called reentrantly. This caused an an important deficiency
in event trigger support to be exposed: on exiting the reentrant call,
the alter table state object was clobbered, causing a crash when the
outer alter table tries to finalize its processing. Fix the crash by
creating a stack of event trigger state objects. There are still ways
to cause things to misbehave (and probably other crashers) with more
elaborate tricks, but at least it now doesn't crash in the obvious
scenario.
Backpatch to 9.5, where DDL deparsing of event triggers was introduced.
Reported-by: Marco Slot
Authors: Michaël Paquier, Álvaro Herrera
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CANNhMLCpi+HQ7M36uPfGbJZEQLyTy7XvX=5EFkpR-b1bo0uJew@mail.gmail.com
EventTriggerTableRewrite crashed if there were table_rewrite triggers
present, but there had not been when the calling command started.
EventTriggerDDLCommandEnd called ddl_command_end triggers if present,
even if there had been no such triggers when the calling command started,
which would lead to a failure in pg_event_trigger_ddl_commands.
In both cases, fix by doing nothing; it's better to wait till the next
command when things will be properly initialized.
In passing, remove an elog(DEBUG1) call that might have seemed interesting
four years ago but surely isn't today.
We found this because of intermittent failures in the buildfarm. Thanks
to Alvaro Herrera and Andrew Gierth for analysis.
Back-patch to 9.5; some of this code exists before that, but the specific
hazards we need to guard against don't.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/5767.1523995174@sss.pgh.pa.us
AclObjectKind was basically just another enumeration for object types,
and we already have a preferred one for that. It's only used in
aclcheck_error. By using ObjectType instead, we can also give some more
precise error messages, for example "index" instead of "relation".
Reviewed-by: Michael Paquier <michael.paquier@gmail.com>
There used to be a lot of different *Type and *Kind symbol groups to
address objects within different commands, most of which have been
replaced by ObjectType, starting with
b256f24264. But this conversion was never
done for the ACL commands until now.
This change ends up being just a plain replacement of the types and
symbols, without any code restructuring needed, except deleting some now
redundant code.
Reviewed-by: Michael Paquier <michael.paquier@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net>
This adds a new object type "procedure" that is similar to a function
but does not have a return type and is invoked by the new CALL statement
instead of SELECT or similar. This implementation is aligned with the
SQL standard and compatible with or similar to other SQL implementations.
This commit adds new commands CALL, CREATE/ALTER/DROP PROCEDURE, as well
as ALTER/DROP ROUTINE that can refer to either a function or a
procedure (or an aggregate function, as an extension to SQL). There is
also support for procedures in various utility commands such as COMMENT
and GRANT, as well as support in pg_dump and psql. Support for defining
procedures is available in all the languages supplied by the core
distribution.
While this commit is mainly syntax sugar around existing functionality,
future features will rely on having procedures as a separate object
type.
Reviewed-by: Andrew Dunstan <andrew.dunstan@2ndquadrant.com>
Don't move parenthesized lines to the left, even if that means they
flow past the right margin.
By default, BSD indent lines up statement continuation lines that are
within parentheses so that they start just to the right of the preceding
left parenthesis. However, traditionally, if that resulted in the
continuation line extending to the right of the desired right margin,
then indent would push it left just far enough to not overrun the margin,
if it could do so without making the continuation line start to the left of
the current statement indent. That makes for a weird mix of indentations
unless one has been completely rigid about never violating the 80-column
limit.
This behavior has been pretty universally panned by Postgres developers.
Hence, disable it with indent's new -lpl switch, so that parenthesized
lines are always lined up with the preceding left paren.
This patch is much less interesting than the first round of indent
changes, but also bulkier, so I thought it best to separate the effects.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/E1dAmxK-0006EE-1r@gemulon.postgresql.org
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/30527.1495162840@sss.pgh.pa.us
Change pg_bsd_indent to follow upstream rules for placement of comments
to the right of code, and remove pgindent hack that caused comments
following #endif to not obey the general rule.
Commit e3860ffa4d wasn't actually using
the published version of pg_bsd_indent, but a hacked-up version that
tried to minimize the amount of movement of comments to the right of
code. The situation of interest is where such a comment has to be
moved to the right of its default placement at column 33 because there's
code there. BSD indent has always moved right in units of tab stops
in such cases --- but in the previous incarnation, indent was working
in 8-space tab stops, while now it knows we use 4-space tabs. So the
net result is that in about half the cases, such comments are placed
one tab stop left of before. This is better all around: it leaves
more room on the line for comment text, and it means that in such
cases the comment uniformly starts at the next 4-space tab stop after
the code, rather than sometimes one and sometimes two tabs after.
Also, ensure that comments following #endif are indented the same
as comments following other preprocessor commands such as #else.
That inconsistency turns out to have been self-inflicted damage
from a poorly-thought-through post-indent "fixup" in pgindent.
This patch is much less interesting than the first round of indent
changes, but also bulkier, so I thought it best to separate the effects.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/E1dAmxK-0006EE-1r@gemulon.postgresql.org
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/30527.1495162840@sss.pgh.pa.us
Remove default cases from assorted switches over ObjectClass and some
related enum types, so that we'll get compiler warnings when someone
adds a new enum value without accounting for it in all these places.
In passing, re-order some switch cases as needed to match the declaration
of enum ObjectClass. OK, that's just neatnik-ism, but I dislike code
that looks like it was assembled with the help of a dartboard.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20170512221010.nglatgt5azzdxjlj@alvherre.pgsql
copyObject() is declared to return void *, which allows easily assigning
the result independent of the input, but it loses all type checking.
If the compiler supports typeof or something similar, cast the result to
the input type. This creates a greater amount of type safety. In some
cases, where the result is assigned to a generic type such as Node * or
Expr *, new casts are now necessary, but in general casts are now
unnecessary in the normal case and indicate that something unusual is
happening.
Reviewed-by: Mark Dilger <hornschnorter@gmail.com>
Add support for explicitly declared statistic objects (CREATE
STATISTICS), allowing collection of statistics on more complex
combinations that individual table columns. Companion commands DROP
STATISTICS and ALTER STATISTICS ... OWNER TO / SET SCHEMA / RENAME are
added too. All this DDL has been designed so that more statistic types
can be added later on, such as multivariate most-common-values and
multivariate histograms between columns of a single table, leaving room
for permitting columns on multiple tables, too, as well as expressions.
This commit only adds support for collection of n-distinct coefficient
on user-specified sets of columns in a single table. This is useful to
estimate number of distinct groups in GROUP BY and DISTINCT clauses;
estimation errors there can cause over-allocation of memory in hashed
aggregates, for instance, so it's a worthwhile problem to solve. A new
special pseudo-type pg_ndistinct is used.
(num-distinct estimation was deemed sufficiently useful by itself that
this is worthwhile even if no further statistic types are added
immediately; so much so that another version of essentially the same
functionality was submitted by Kyotaro Horiguchi:
https://postgr.es/m/20150828.173334.114731693.horiguchi.kyotaro@lab.ntt.co.jp
though this commit does not use that code.)
Author: Tomas Vondra. Some code rework by Álvaro.
Reviewed-by: Dean Rasheed, David Rowley, Kyotaro Horiguchi, Jeff Janes,
Ideriha Takeshi
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/543AFA15.4080608@fuzzy.czhttps://postgr.es/m/20170320190220.ixlaueanxegqd5gr@alvherre.pgsql
This extends the work done in commit 2f5c9d9c9 to provide a more nearly
complete abstraction layer hiding the details of index updating for catalog
changes. That commit only invented abstractions for catalog inserts and
updates, leaving nearby code for catalog deletes still calling the
heap-level routines directly. That seems rather ugly from here, and it
does little to help if we ever want to shift to a storage system in which
indexing work is needed at delete time.
Hence, create a wrapper function CatalogTupleDelete(), and replace calls
of simple_heap_delete() on catalog tuples with it. There are now very
few direct calls of [simple_]heap_delete remaining in the tree.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/462.1485902736@sss.pgh.pa.us
Split the existing CatalogUpdateIndexes into two different routines,
CatalogTupleInsert and CatalogTupleUpdate, which do both the heap
insert/update plus the index update. This removes over 300 lines of
boilerplate code all over src/backend/catalog/ and src/backend/commands.
The resulting code is much more pleasing to the eye.
Also, by encapsulating what happens in detail during an UPDATE, this
facilitates the upcoming WARM patch, which is going to add a few more
lines to the update case making the boilerplate even more boring.
The original CatalogUpdateIndexes is removed; there was only one use
left, and since it's just three lines, we can as well expand it in place
there. We could keep it, but WARM is going to break all the UPDATE
out-of-core callsites anyway, so there seems to be no benefit in doing
so.
Author: Pavan Deolasee
Discussion: https://www.postgr.es/m/CABOikdOcFYSZ4vA2gYfs=M2cdXzXX4qGHeEiW3fu9PCfkHLa2A@mail.gmail.com
I found that half a dozen (nearly 5%) of our AllocSetContextCreate calls
had typos in the context-sizing parameters. While none of these led to
especially significant problems, they did create minor inefficiencies,
and it's now clear that expecting people to copy-and-paste those calls
accurately is not a great idea. Let's reduce the risk of future errors
by introducing single macros that encapsulate the common use-cases.
Three such macros are enough to cover all but two special-purpose contexts;
those two calls can be left as-is, I think.
While this patch doesn't in itself improve matters for third-party
extensions, it doesn't break anything for them either, and they can
gradually adopt the simplified notation over time.
In passing, change TopMemoryContext to use the default allocation
parameters. Formerly it could only be extended 8K at a time. That was
probably reasonable when this code was written; but nowadays we create
many more contexts than we did then, so that it's not unusual to have a
couple hundred K in TopMemoryContext, even without considering various
dubious code that sticks other things there. There seems no good reason
not to let it use growing blocks like most other contexts.
Back-patch to 9.6, mostly because that's still close enough to HEAD that
it's easy to do so, and keeping the branches in sync can be expected to
avoid some future back-patching pain. The bugs fixed by these changes
don't seem to be significant enough to justify fixing them further back.
Discussion: <21072.1472321324@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Our actual convention, contrary to what I said in 59a2111b23, is not to
quote type names, as evidenced by unquoted use of format_type_be()
result value in error messages. Remove quotes from recently tweaked
messages accordingly.
Per note from Tom Lane
Change the slightly different variations of the message
function FOO must return type BAR
to a single wording, removing the variability in type name so that they
all create a single translation entry; since the type name is not to be
translated, there's no point in it being part of the message anyway.
Also, change them all to use the same quoting convention, namely that
the function name is not to be quoted but the type name is. (I'm not
quite sure why this is so, but it's the clear majority.)
Some similar messages such as "encoding conversion function FOO must ..."
are also changed.
This enables external code to create access methods. This is useful so
that extensions can add their own access methods which can be formally
tracked for dependencies, so that DROP operates correctly. Also, having
explicit support makes pg_dump work correctly.
Currently only index AMs are supported, but we expect different types to
be added in the future.
Authors: Alexander Korotkov, Petr Jelínek
Reviewed-By: Teodor Sigaev, Petr Jelínek, Jim Nasby
Commitfest-URL: https://commitfest.postgresql.org/9/353/
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAPpHfdsXwZmojm6Dx+TJnpYk27kT4o7Ri6X_4OSWcByu1Rm+VA@mail.gmail.com
A few places assumed they could pass NULL for the argtypes array when
looking up functions known to have zero arguments. At first glance
it seems that this should be safe enough, since memcmp() is surely not
allowed to fetch any bytes if its count argument is zero. However,
close reading of the C standard says that such calls have undefined
behavior, so we'd probably best avoid it.
Since the number of places doing this is quite small, and some other
places looking up zero-argument functions were already passing dummy
arrays, let's standardize on the latter solution rather than hacking
the function lookup code to avoid calling memcmp() in these cases.
I also added Asserts to catch any future violations of the new rule.
Given the utter lack of any evidence that this actually causes any
problems in the field, I don't feel a need to back-patch this change.
Per report from Piotr Stefaniak, though this is not his patch.
Michael Paquier