Re: [CORE] Restore-reliability mode

On 2015-06-05 11:20:52 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> I don't maintain that end-user testing is unuseful at this point.

Unless I misunderstand you, and you're not saying that user level
testing wouldn't be helpful right now, I'm utterly baffled. There's
loads of user-exposed features that desperately need exposure.

Looking at https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/What%27s_new_in_PostgreSQL I
don't see a single item that correlates with the ones on the open items
list list. Sure, it's incomplete. But that's a lot of stuff to test
already. And the authors of those features can work on fixing the issues
coming up. Lots of those features have barely got any testing at this
point.

> do maintain that it would be better to (1) finish fixing the known
> multixact bugs and (2) clean up some of the open items before we make
> a big push in that direction.

There's maybe 3-4 people that can actually do something about the
existing issues on that list. The community is far bigger than
that. Right now everyone is sitting on the sidelines and twiddling their
thumbs or developing new stuff. At least that's my impression.

> 2. custom-join has no way to construct Plan nodes of child Path nodes
> - The entire feature is a C API, and the API needs to be changed. We
> should finalize the API before asking people to test whether they can
> use it for interesting things.

I think any real world exposure of that API will result in much larger
changes than that.

> 3. recovery_target_action = pause & hot_standby = off - Rumor has it
> we replaced one surprising behavior with a different but
> equally-surprising behavior. We should decide what the right thing is
> and make sure the code is doing that before calling it a release.

Fujii pushed the bugfix, restoring the old behaviour afaics. It's imo
still crazy, but at this point it doesn't look like a 9.5 discussion.

> 4. Arguable RLS security bug, EvalPlanQual() paranoia - This seems
> like another question of what the expectations around RLS actually
> are.

In the end that's minor from the end user's perspective.

> I would also argue that we really ought to make a decision about
> "basebackups during ALTER DATABASE ... SET TABLESPACE ... not safe"
> before we get too close to final release. Maybe it's not a
> beta-blocker, exactly, but it doesn't seem like the sort of change
> that should be rushed in too close to the end, because it looks sorta
> complicated and scary. (Those are the technical terms.)

Yea, I'd really like to get that in at some point. I'll work on it as
soon I've finished the multixact truncation thingy.

Greetings,

Andres Freund