Re: 8.4 open items list

Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PostgreSQL_8.4_Open_Items

> That includes a whole slough of patches that weren't submitted until
> after November 1st and which I think should probably be bumped en
> masse to 8.5:

> Change behavior of statement-level triggers for inheritance cases?

Agreed: no patch submitted, not a bug (we'd never consider back-patching
such a change), and no obvious reason why it should be part of 8.4
rather than waiting.

> GetCurrentVirtualXIDs() (is this patch safe?)

This is actually an extract from the hot standby patch, so I think it's
unfair to claim it was submitted too late. If I thought it were safe
I'd apply it, but I'm not convinced.

> PQinitSSL broken in some use cases

This is a hard case. It's arguably a bug fix, but not one that we could
back-patch. I think we would have applied it by now if there were
consensus on which solution to pick.

> postgresql.conf: patch to have ParseConfigFile report all parsing
> errors, then bail

Agreed, this is in the "too late" category.

> small but useful patches for text search

Ditto.

> Additional DTrace Probes

This arguably is part of the existing 8.4 dtrace-related changes,
but it hasn't gotten any review that I saw. (And after having found
a number of problems in the earlier dtrace patches, I'm disinclined
to let it in without close review ...)

> pg_standby trigger behavior is dangerous

Another sort-of-a-bug case; I'm inclined to leave it on the list
until a bit of consensus emerges.

> psql \d commands and information_schema (already in CommitFest 2009-First)

This isn't a feature, it's a bug fix for the already committed changes
in \d's system-vs-user filtering. (Which I remain terribly unhappy with
in general, but that's a different list entry...)

> Have \d show child tables that inherit from the specified parent
> (already in CommitFest 2009-First)

Agreed, this is a new feature that can wait.

> I think we should also boot everything in the "pre-existing bugs"
> category,

Well, some of the things on this page are beta blockers and some are
just stuff that we'd like to address before final. Of the "pre existing
bugs", the only one that I'm really concerned about addressing before
beta is the polymorphic types vs. domains issue. Changing that has some
potential for breaking user apps so it'd be polite to make it happen
before beta starts. The rest should stay on the page, though, to be
addressed during beta.

> and the first two items from the "questions" category, which
> don't seem important enough to worry about at this stage of the game.

Both of those things are related to 8.4 feature changes, so we should
either do them now or decide we won't do them.

regards, tom lane