BUG #15113: alter table .. add column .. default null leads to table rewrite

The following bug has been logged on the website:

Bug reference: 15113
Logged by: Alexey Ermakov
Email address: alexey.ermakov@dataegret.com
PostgreSQL version: 9.6.8
Operating system: Linux
Description:

Hello,

I've recently discovered that following 2 alters produces different
results:

alter table xx add column yy1 character varying(10) default null;
alter table xx add column yy2 character varying(10);

yy1 | character varying(10) | default NULL::character varying
| extended | |
yy2 | character varying(10) |
| extended | |

First one will lead to table rewrite which might be surprising since there
is no such difference for types without constraints, last one won't.

I found this comment which I think explains why this happens in
https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/REL_10_STABLE/src/backend/commands/tablecmds.c#L5323:
* An exception occurs when the new column is of a domain type: the
domain
* might have a NOT NULL constraint, or a check constraint that
indirectly
* rejects nulls. If there are any domain constraints then we construct
* an explicit NULL default value that will be passed through
* CoerceToDomain processing. (This is a tad inefficient, since it
causes
* rewriting the table which we really don't have to do, but the present
* design of domain processing doesn't offer any simple way of checking
* the constraints more directly.)

Perhaps something need to be changed to handle such cases better.

Thanks,
Alexey Ermakov