Re: Remove Deprecated Exclusive Backup Mode

Greetings,

* Robert Haas (robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com) wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 1, 2020 at 4:29 PM Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> > Agreed. I don't think three modes would help anyone.
>
> Well, I think that if and when we remove the existing exclusive mode,
> we're going to break a bunch of people's backup scripts. I think it's
> appropriate to do that eventually, but I'm not in a big rush. Long
> deprecation periods are a feature, not a bug.

This is pretty tangential to the overall discussion, but I generally
disagree that deprecation periods beyond what we already, always,
provide thanks to supporting 5 major versions concurrently are actually
a feature or are healthy for the project.

I continue to find it curious that we stress a great deal over (very
likely) poorly written backup scripts that haven't been updated in the
5+? years since exclusive mode was deprecated, but we happily add new
keywords in new major versions and remove columns in our catalog tables
or rename columns or entirely redo how recovery works (breaking every
script out there that performed a restore..) or do any number of other
things that potentially break applications that communicate through the
PG protocol and other parts of the system that very likely have scripts
that were written to work with them.

I'm really of the opinion that we need to stop doing that.

If someone could explain what is so special about *this* part of the
system that we absolutely can't possibly accept any change that might
break user's scripts, and why it's worth all of the angst, maintenance,
ridiculously difficult documentation to understand and hacks (the
interface to pg_start_backup is ridiculously warty because of this), I'd
greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,

Stephen