I wrote:
> That TODO item should either be removed or marked with a warning stating
> that it's next door to impossible. (Unfortunately, a lot of our TODO
> items are like that ... there's usually a good reason why they're not
> done already.)
Actually ... I'm not sure if this idea has been discussed before, but
what if we redefined what "delete" means? We could add an "isdropped"
column to pg_enum, and have DROP do nothing but set that flag, and
modify enum_in to reject such values. Then comparisons still work,
and whether there are remaining instances of the value is the
user's problem not ours.
pg_dump and pg_upgrade would need to jump through some hoops to
deal with this, but it's not any harder than a lot of other
weird cases they deal with.
regards, tom lane
