Re: WIP: Access method extendability

* Alexander Korotkov (aekorotkov(at)gmail(dot)com) wrote:
> Having access methods as extensions can significantly improves situations
> here. Imagine, GIN was an extension. One day we decide to change its binary
> format. Then we can issue new extension, GIN2 for instance. User can
> upgrade from GIN to GIN2 in following steps:

We could support this without having GIN be an extension by simply
having a GIN2 in core also, so I don't buy off on this being a good
reason for extensions to provide AMs. For my 2c, I'm pretty happy with
the general idea of "read-old, write-new" to deal with transistions.

It's more complicated, certainly, but I don't think trying to force
users off of an old version is actually going to work all that well and
we'd just end up having to support both the old and new extensions
indefinitely anyway.

Thanks,

Stephen