Re: v12 and pg_restore -f-

Greetings,

* Justin Pryzby (pryzby(at)telsasoft(dot)com) wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 17, 2019 at 12:24:10PM +0200, Tom Lane wrote:
> > Alternatively, we could revoke the requirement to use "-f -" in 12,
> > and wait a couple releases before enforcing it. The fundamental
> > problem here is that we tried to go from "-f - doesn't work" to
> > "you must use -f -" with no grace period where "-f - is optional".
> > In hindsight that was a bad idea.
>
> I'm going to make an argument in favour of keeping the enforcement of -f- in
> v12.
>
> If there's no enforcement, I don't know if many people would naturally start to
> use -f-, which means that tools which need to work across a wide range of
> (minor) versions may never confront this until it's enforced in v14/v15, at
> which point we probably end up revisiting the whole thing again.
>
> Failing pg_restore forces people to confront the new/different behavior. If we
> defer failing for 2 years, it probably just means it'll be an issue again 2
> years from now.

Absolutely agreed on this- deferring the pain doesn't really change
things here.

> However, it's still an issue if (old) back branches (like 11.5) don't support
> -f-, and I think the differing behavior should be called out in the v12 release
> notes, as succinctly as possible.

I agree that we should call it out in the release notes, of course, and
that, in this case, it's alright to fix the '-f-' bug that exists in the
back branches as a bug and not something else.

> Also, I'm taking the opportunity to correct myself, before someone else does:
>
> On Wed, Oct 16, 2019 at 02:28:40PM -0500, Justin Pryzby wrote:
> > And vendors (something like pgadmin) will end up "having to" write to a file
> > to be portable, or else check the full version, not just the major version.
>
> I take back that part .. before v12, they'd get stdout by not specifying -f,
> and since 12.0 they'd get stdout with -f-. No need to check the minor version,
> since the "need to" specify -f- wouldn't be backpatched, of course.

Ah, yes, that's true.

Thanks,

Stephen