Re: remove flatfiles.c

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 2:31 PM, Tom Lane<tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Greg Stark <gsstark(at)mit(dot)edu> writes:
>> On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 6:41 PM, Josh Berkus<josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
>>>> Perhaps we should go one version with a enable_legacy_full_vacuum
>>>> which defaults to off. That would at least let us hear about use cases
>>>> where people are unhappy with a replacement.
>>>
>>> I think we do need to do this, just because people won't have changed
>>> their admin scripts.  But the goal should be to dump VACUUM FULL
>>> entirely by 8.6 if we *don't* get serious use-cases.
>
>> We could deal with the admin scripts by making VACUUM FULL do the new
>> behaviour. But I actually don't really like that. I wold prefer to
>> break VACUUM FULL since anyone doing it routinely is probably
>> mistaken. We could name the command something which is more
>> descriptive like VACUUM REWRITE or VACUUM REBUILD or something like
>> that.
>
> What's wrong with just ignoring the FULL option?  It's a reserved
> word anyway because of FULL OUTER JOINs, so there's no syntactic
> benefit to be had from eliminating it from the VACUUM syntax.

Silent behavior changes are usually a bad idea.

...Robert