Re: Something for the TODO list: deprecating abstime and friends

On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 01:12:02PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > On Mon, Jul 17, 2017 at 6:12 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> >> So, thinking about how that would actually work ... the thing to do in
> >> order to preserve existing on-disk values is to alternate between signed
> >> and unsigned interpretations of abstimes. That is, right now, abstime
> >> is signed with origin 1970. The conversion I'm arguing we should make
> >> real soon now is to unsigned with origin 1970. If the project lives
> >> so long, in circa 70 years we'd switch it to signed with origin 2106.
> >> Yadda yadda.
>
> > Doesn't this plan amount to breaking pg_upgrade compatibility and
> > hoping that nobody notice?
>
> Well, what we'd need to do is document that the type is only meant to be
> used to store dates within say +/- 30 years from current time. As long
> as people adhere to that use-case, the proposal would work conveniently
> long into the future ...
>
> > If we had two actually
> > separate types and let people convert columns from the old type to the
> > new type with just a validation scan, that would be engineering at the
> > level of quality that I've come to associate with this project.
>
> ... whereas that would be seriously INconvenient. It's not just the
> ALTER TABLE pushups, which presumably would be something you could do
> and forget. It's that the new type name would be something you'd have
> to change your applications to know about, and then you (or more likely
> your successor) would have to do it over again decades later.
>
> I'd definitely be on board with just dropping the type altogether despite
> Mark's concern. But I am not sure that the way you are proposing would
> please anybody except pedants.

+1 for just dropping the types, preferably modifying the contrib
extensions that depend on it, less preferably, dropping those, too.

Best,
David.
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
Phone: +1 415 235 3778 AIM: dfetter666 Yahoo!: dfetter
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