As it happens Steve, DanW and I have had a brief e-mail discussion about this over the past day (Ben's off playing with his laptop on some airplane again).
We're leaning towards augmenting the metadata datamodel with sufficient information to implement this functionality without dependence on the RDBMS's own metadata (in particular Oracle's
"user arguments" view which can't be recreated from the PG system tables and which would be a potential porting hassle for other RDBMS's
as well).
Comments? It seems to us that this would provide us a somewhat RDBMS-independent framework for dealing with this code, though the details will differ for each RDMBS's programmatic language's syntax and semantics.
If we do this, package porters will have to initialize the necessary metadata. Since the code inherited from aD is very inconsistent as to the extent to which packages initialize their package metadata, I was thinking this might be a good time to clean up these loose ends as well.
Steve's looking into more deeply into this approach soon (this weekend, perhaps?) so there should be more information before long, maybe even completion of implementation.
