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Tom Lane authored
The initial implementation of list_qsort(), from commit ab727167, re-used the ListCells of the input list while not touching the List header. This meant that anybody who still had a pointer to the original header would now be in possession of a corrupted list, a problem that seems sure to bite us eventually. One possible solution is to re-use the original List header as well, giving the function the semantics of update-in-place. However, that doesn't seem like a very good idea either given the way that the function is used in the planner: create_path functions aren't normally supposed to modify their input lists. It doesn't look like there would be a problem today, but it's not hard to foresee a time when modifying a list of Paths in-place could have side-effects on some other append path. On the whole, and in view of the likelihood that this function might be used in other contexts in the future, it seems best to get rid of the micro-optimization of re-using the input list cells. Just build a new list. Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/16912.1515449066@sss.pgh.pa.us
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