Re: Fix for FETCH FIRST syntax problems

On Sun, May 20, 2018 at 5:16 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> "David G. Johnston" <david(dot)g(dot)johnston(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>> The risk here is significantly reduced since the existing user-visible
>> behavior is an error which presumably no one is relying upon. Between that
>> and being able to conform to the standard syntax for a long-standing
>> feature I would say the benefit outweighs the cost and risk.
>
> The risk you're ignoring is that this patch will break something that
> *did* work before. Given that the first version did exactly that,
> I do not think that risk should be considered negligible. I'm going
> to change my vote for back-patching from -0.5 to -1.

I'm also -1 for back-patching, although it seems that the ship has
already sailed. I don't think that the failure of something to work
that could have been made to work if the original feature author had
tried harder rises to the level of a bug. If we start routinely
back-patching things that fall into that category, we will certainly
manage to destabilize older releases on a regular basis.

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