Avoiding upgrade backlash

Hackers,

I'm seeing from reports on IRC that 8.3 may cause an unprecedented number
of upgrade issues for users who have old, badly-written applications.
Stefan K, for example, was reporting the necessity of re-writing 3000
lines of his PL/pgSQL code on an older app (about 10%).

While we are right to choke down abuse of implicit casting, it might be a
good idea to give users stronger warnings and instructions.

I'm thinking that we need to warn everyone about:
1) They need to use 8.3's pg_dump, not the old version, to upgrade (this is
always true but now doing it wrong will break a lot more users).
2) They need to check for bugs
3) If Robert gets his type-cast backport package together, the location of
that.

I'm thinking this warning should go (prominently) into the release notes,
the community notice, and the extended web release.

--
--Josh

Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL @ Sun
San Francisco