Previously, pattern_fixed_prefix() was defined to return whatever fixed
prefix it could extract from the pattern, plus the "rest" of the pattern.
That definition was sensible for LIKE patterns, but not so much for
regexes, where reconstituting a valid pattern minus the prefix could be
quite tricky (certainly the existing code wasn't doing that correctly).
Since the only thing that callers ever did with the "rest" of the pattern
was to pass it to like_selectivity() or regex_selectivity(), let's cut out
the middle-man and just have pattern_fixed_prefix's subroutines do this
directly. Then pattern_fixed_prefix can return a simple selectivity
number, and the question of how to cope with partial patterns is removed
from its API specification.
While at it, adjust the API spec so that callers who don't actually care
about the pattern's selectivity (which is a lot of them) can pass NULL for
the selectivity pointer to skip doing the work of computing a selectivity
estimate.
This patch is only an API refactoring that doesn't actually change any
processing, other than allowing a little bit of useless work to be skipped.
However, it's necessary infrastructure for my upcoming fix to regex prefix
extraction, because after that change there won't be any simple way to
identify the "rest" of the regex, not even to the low level of fidelity
needed by regex_selectivity. We can cope with that if regex_fixed_prefix
and regex_selectivity communicate directly, but not if we have to work
within the old API. Hence, back-patch to all active branches.
62b9045666