Re: Online enabling of checksums

On 2018-04-06 19:31:56 -0400, Stephen Frost wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> * Robert Haas (robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com) wrote:
> > On Fri, Apr 6, 2018 at 6:56 PM, Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> wrote:
> > > no one can entirely quibble with the rationale that this is ok (I'll
> > > post a patch cleaning up the atomics simulation of flags in a bit), but
> > > this is certainly not a correct locking strategy.
> >
> > I think we have enough evidence at this point to conclude that this
> > patch, along with MERGE, should be reverted.
>
> I'm not sure that I see some issues around getting the locking correct
> when starting/stopping the process is really evidence of a major problem
> with the patch-

Note that there've been several other things mentioned in the
thread. I'll add some more in a bit.

> yes, it obviously needs to be fixed and it would have been unfortuante
> if we hadn't caught it, but a good bit of effort appears to have been
> taken to ensure that exactly this is tested (which is in part why the
> buildfarm is failing) and this evidently found an existing bug, which
> is hardly this patch's fault.

THAT is the problem. It costs people that haven't been involved in the
feature time. I've friggin started debugging this because nobody else
could be bothered. Even though I'd planned to spend that time on other
patches that have been submitted far ahead in time.

> I'm quite sure that bringing up MERGE in this thread and saying it needs
> to be reverted without even having the committer of that feature on the
> CC list isn't terribly useful and conflates two otherwise unrelated
> patches and efforts.

Robert also mentioned it on the other thread, so... And no, they're not
unrelated matters, in that it's pushing half baked stuff.

Greetings,

Andres Freund