Re: Undocumented PQdisplayTuples and PQprintTuples in libpq

Michael Paquier <michael(at)paquier(dot)xyz> writes:
> On Mon, Aug 05, 2019 at 06:54:32AM +0200, Fabien COELHO wrote:
>> How do you know that they are not used by anyone in the wild?
>> If they are broken, it would be a clue. If not, possibly someone somewhere
>> could be using it, eg for debug (what does this result look like?).

> They have been around for more than 19 years, and they have been
> undocumented for this much amount of time. github does not report any
> reference to any of them. Of course I cannot say that nobody has code
> using them, but the odds that this number is close to zero are really
> high, and that they ought to use something a bit newer if need be.

I'm afraid that we will get pushback from vendors who say that removing an
exported function is an ABI break. At minimum, certain people will insist
that this requires an increment in the shlib major version for libpq.so.
And that will cause a lot of pain, because it'd mean that v13 libpq.so
is no longer usable by applications built against older releases.

On the whole, I think benign neglect is the best policy here.

regards, tom lane