Re: Removal of deprecated views pg_user, pg_group, pg_shadow

On Mon, Feb 13, 2017 at 2:42 PM, Alvaro Herrera
<alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> Robert Haas wrote:
>> My big objection to removing these views is that it will break pgAdmin
>> 3, which uses all three of these views. I understand that the pgAdmin
>> community is now moving away from pgAdmin 3 and toward pgAdmin 4, but
>> I bet that pgAdmin 3 still has significant usage and will continue to
>> have significant usage for at least a year or three. When it's
>> thoroughly dead, then I think we can go ahead and do this, unless
>> there are other really important tools still depending on those views,
>> but it's only been 3 months since the final pgAdmin 3 release.
>
> Well, we can remove them from PG10 and pgAdmin3 (and others) be adjusted
> to use the new ones, conditionally on server version. Surely pgAdmin3
> is going to receive further updates, given that it's still widely used?

According to the pgAdmin web site, no. (Yeah, that does seem odd.)

>> IMHO, these views aren't costing us much. It'd be nice to get rid of
>> them eventually but a view definition doesn't really need much
>> maintenance.
>
> Maybe not, but the fact that they convey misleading information is bad.

Has anyone actually been confused by them?

I'm a bit skeptical about the idea that these are misleading people,
because the information is no more or less misleading now than it was
in PostgreSQL 8.1 when the views were introduced. And evidently it
was not so misleading at that time as to make us thing that a hard
compatibility break was warranted.

On the other hand, I suppose that the last version of pgAdmin 3 isn't
likely to work with future major versions of PostgreSQL anyway unless
somebody updates it, and if somebody decides to update it for the
other changes in v10 then updating it for the removal of these views
won't be much extra work. So maybe it doesn't matter.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company