Re: Our feature change policy

On Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 11:57:13AM -0400, Stephen Frost wrote:
> Tom,
>
> * Tom Lane (tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us) wrote:
> > Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> writes:
> > > * Bruce Momjian (bruce(at)momjian(dot)us) wrote:
> > >> 1. make the change now and mention it in the release notes
> > >> 2. #1, but also provide backward compatibility for 5+ years
> > >> 3. mark the feature as deprecated and remove/change it in 5+ years
> > >> 4. #3, but issue a warning for deprecated usage
...
> > Well, to what extent are we "holding up progress" in this particular
> > case? There is no other development work that's stalled by not renaming
> > these binaries. I think there should be some explicit accounting for
> > the impact of delay if we're going to try to formalize these decisions
> > better.
>
> The rename of the binaries is case #2 above, at least as I was thinking
> of it. I don't believe we are holding up progress in that case.

Agreed.

> I was imagining the changes to pg_stat_activity as possibly falling
> under #3/change, meaning that we'd wait for 5 years before actually
> renaming those columns, which is part of why I was objecting to that
> idea.

Yes, that is a good point. Removing contrib/tsearch2 or contrib/xml2 is
really not holding up progress on anything, but not delaying the
addition of wait event reporting to pg_stat_activity is certainly
holding up progress. #3 and #4 would need to be weighted depending on
whether choosing them would delay progress, e.g. it did delay progress
on standard-conforming strings, but the delay was determined to be
reasonable.

> If we're able to make the change and provide backwards compatibility
> then I think the main question is if it's worth it to do so and, if so,
> when are we going to remove that backwards compatibility. If we don't
> expect to ever be able to remove it, then that's an issue.

Agreed.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

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