another section if required by the platform (instead of the old way of
building them in section "l" and always transforming them to the
platform-specific section).
This speeds up the installation on common platforms, and it avoids some
funny business with the man page tools and build process.
grammar allows ALTER TABLE/INDEX/SEQUENCE/VIEW interchangeably for all
subforms of those commands, and then we sort out what's really legal
at execution time. This allows the ALTER SEQUENCE/VIEW reference pages
to fully document all the ALTER forms available for sequences and views
respectively, and eliminates a longstanding cause of confusion for users.
The net effect is that the following forms are allowed that weren't before:
ALTER SEQUENCE OWNER TO
ALTER VIEW ALTER COLUMN SET/DROP DEFAULT
ALTER VIEW OWNER TO
ALTER VIEW SET SCHEMA
(There's no actual functionality gain here, but formerly you had to say
ALTER TABLE instead.)
Interestingly, the grammar tables actually get smaller, probably because
there are fewer special cases to keep track of.
I did not disallow using ALTER TABLE for these operations. Perhaps we
should, but there's a backwards-compatibility issue if we do; in fact
it would break existing pg_dump scripts. I did however tighten up
ALTER SEQUENCE and ALTER VIEW to reject non-sequences and non-views
in the new cases as well as a couple of cases where they didn't before.
The patch doesn't change pg_dump to use the new syntaxes, either.
Sequences and views could previously be renamed using ALTER TABLE, but
this was a repeated source of confusion for users. Update the docs,
and psql tab completion. Patch from David Fetter; various minor fixes
by myself.
