Re: Removal of deprecated views pg_user, pg_group, pg_shadow

* Robert Haas (robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com) wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 9, 2017 at 8:54 PM, Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:
> > Note that these views have not been consistently maintained and have
> > ended up including some role attributes from recent versions
>
> That's not a bug. According to the documentation, these views exist
> for compatibility with PostgreSQL versions before 8.1, so there's no
> need to update them with newer fields. Clients who are expecting to
> talk with a pre-8.1 PostgreSQL won't expect those fields to be present
> anyway.

Yet we added bypassrls to them, after a similar discussion of how
they're for backwards compat and we can't get rid of them, but we should
update them with new things, blah, blah.

> My big objection to removing these views is that it will break pgAdmin
> 3, which uses all three of these views. I understand that the pgAdmin
> community is now moving away from pgAdmin 3 and toward pgAdmin 4, but
> I bet that pgAdmin 3 still has significant usage and will continue to
> have significant usage for at least a year or three. When it's
> thoroughly dead, then I think we can go ahead and do this, unless
> there are other really important tools still depending on those views,
> but it's only been 3 months since the final pgAdmin 3 release.

IMHO, if it's dead enough to not get updated for such changes then we
shouldn't care enough about it to maintain backwards compat views in our
code-base for it.

> IMHO, these views aren't costing us much. It'd be nice to get rid of
> them eventually but a view definition doesn't really need much
> maintenance. (A contrib module doesn't either, but more than a view
> definition.)

Clearly, it does need some form of maintenance and consideration or it
ends up in a confusing and inconsistent state, as evidenced by the fact
that that's exactly where we are. I don't really expect to actually win
this argument, as I've had the experience of trying to fight this fight
before, but I certainly don't agree that we should try to continue to
maintain them for pgAdmin3's sake.

Thanks!

Stephen