Itagaki Takahiro, with slight modifications.

only for secondary page split (i.e. for non-first columns of index)

 Patch by Paul Ramsey <pramsey@opengeo.org>

provided by Andrew.

from buggy user-defined picksplit to GiST.

"consistent" functions, and remove pg_amop.opreqcheck, as per recent
discussion.  The main immediate benefit of this is that we no longer need
8.3's ugly hack of requiring @@@ rather than @@ to test weight-using tsquery
searches on GIN indexes.  In future it should be possible to optimize some
other queries better than is done now, by detecting at runtime whether the
index match is exact or not.

Tom Lane, after an idea of Heikki's, and with some help from Teodor.

big misalignement, then it tries to split page basing on distribution
of boxe's centers.

Per report from  Dolafi, Tom <dolafit@janelia.hhmi.org>

 Backpatch is needed, change doesn't affect on-disk storage.

back-stamped for this.

agreed these symbols are less easily confused.  I made new pg_operator
entries (with new OIDs) for the old names, so as to provide backward
compatibility while making it pretty easy to remove the old names in
some future release cycle.  This commit only touches the core datatypes,
contrib will be fixed separately.

* new split algorithm (as proposed in http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2006-06/msg00254.php)
  * possible call pickSplit() for second and below columns
  * add spl_(l|r)datum_exists to GIST_SPLITVEC -
    pickSplit should check its values to use already defined
    spl_(l|r)datum for splitting. pickSplit should set
    spl_(l|r)datum_exists to 'false' (if they was 'true') to
    signal to caller about using spl_(l|r)datum.
  * support for old pickSplit(): not very optimal
    but correct split
* remove 'bytes' field from GISTENTRY: in any case size of
  value is defined by it's type.
* split GIST_SPLITVEC to two structures: one for using in picksplit
  and second - for internal use.
* some code refactoring
* support of subsplit to rtree opclasses

TODO: add support of subsplit to contrib modules

basic regression tests for GiST to the standard regression tests.
I took the opportunity to add an rtree-equivalent gist opclass for
circles; the contrib version only covered boxes and polygons, but
indexing circles is very handy for distance searches.

to the existing X-direction tests.  An rtree class now includes 4 actual
2-D tests, 4 1-D X-direction tests, and 4 1-D Y-direction tests.
This involved adding four new Y-direction test operators for each of
box and polygon; I followed the PostGIS project's lead as to the names
of these operators.
NON BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE CHANGE: the poly_overleft (&<) and poly_overright
(&>) operators now have semantics comparable to box_overleft and box_overright.
This is necessary to make r-tree indexes work correctly on polygons.
Also, I changed circle_left and circle_right to agree with box_left and
box_right --- formerly they allowed the boundaries to touch.  This isn't
actually essential given the lack of any r-tree opclass for circles, but
it seems best to sync all the definitions while we are at it.

polygon operators (<<, &<, >>, &>).  Per ideas originally put forward
by andrew@supernews and later rediscovered by moi.  This patch just
fixes the existing opclasses, and does not add any new behavior as I
proposed earlier; that can be sorted out later.  In principle this
could be back-patched, since it changes only search behavior and not
system catalog entries nor rtree index contents.  I'm not currently
planning to do that, though, since I think it could use more testing.

them, the executation behavior could be unexpected.

methods in a short-lived memory context, there is no need for GiST methods
to do their own manual (and error-prone) memory management.

boxes. Change interface to user-defined GiST support methods union and
picksplit. Now instead of bytea struct it used special GistEntryVector
structure.

$Header: -> $PostgreSQL Changes ...

Patch from Teodor Sigaev.

tests pass.

for haskeytype).  Update GiST contrib modules too.  Add linear-time split
algorithm for R-tree GiST opclass.
From Oleg Bartunov and Teodor Sigaev.

Oleg Bartunov and Teodor Sigaev.