[postgis-devel] Raster/Vector split ready to exploit in trunk

[Sandro Santilli]

I've merged my work on raster/vector split,
closing https://trac.osgeo.org/postgis/ticket/3888

The merge resulted in multiple SVN commits, last
of which referenced the ticket in the log. Maybe
I should have used a squash-merge but oh well,
too late to cry: I gave more value to the granularity
of changes.

With r16757 I've also given an update at installation
documentation, which was also left behind beyond the
raster split.

Please TEST TEST TEST. Main risk is loosing all your
data so TEST IN ISOLATION and try to loose your data
as much as possible.

Known risks: uninstall scripts (rtpostgis_uninstall.sql,
postgis_uninstall.sql, etc.) all end up with a DROP CASCADE
on the custom datatypes. This seems to be _STILL_ (!)
the only way to break a circular dependency between a TYPE
and its input/output functions (I'd love to be contraddicted).

I've committed some code to try at reduce the risk by failing
earlier if any table column is using any of the datatypes to
be dropped but I might have missed some scenarios (views using
the datatype ? functions using the datatype ?). Black hats:
try in those directions maybe.

Incidentally: in one occasion I seemed to have handled to drop
all my _geometry_ columns by loading the raster uninstall script.
I could NOT reproduce this but just to WARN you again: be careful.


Idea for further improvement: provide an SQL function to perform
the _unload_ of unpackaged extensions.

Have fun playing cracker !

--strk; 

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