Re: scary patch contest

On Tue, Aug 25, 2026 at 2:50 PM Melanie Plageman
<melanieplageman(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> I don't feel like there is consensus that we need to revert this yet.

+1.

> One thing that I'm wondering is if the ease with which LLMs allow
> people to pressure test features means we are finding more bugs sooner
> than we have in the past. With online checksums, as far as I
> understand, the design has consensus and the implementation has
> required follow-on commits but not more than other similar sized
> features that weren't reverted.

I'm not sure about that last part, because this came out of an
LLM-driven analysis of features that required a lot of post-commit
fixing. It's not unique in that, but it has required a lot of fixes.

> I understand that the concern is 1)
> data corruption is especially bad and 2) if there were bugs so far,
> who knows what more could be lurking. But I tend to wonder if 2 is
> changing because of how easy it is to look for bugs now.

I don't know. I don't especially care about low-probability bugs that
are unlikely to be hit in practice, but it's not clear to me the stuff
thus far fixed should be placed in that category. In any event, if
we've fixed most of the stuff real users are likely to hit, that's
good enough. If we haven't, that's potentially a problem. Even then,
if the remaining bugs are things that have few architectural
implications and can likely be cleaned up in a minor release without
causing much trouble, that may still be fine, the exception being if
there are really a lot of them. But if we put out a .0 release and
then discover, for example, an online-checksum bug that can't be fixed
without bumping catversion, that would be very awkward. I'm not saying
that particular thing is likely, but just that once .0 goes out we
have fewer options to resolve remaining problems and everything gets
more painful because there are real production clusters out there to
worry about. I'm not trying to prejudge the outcome here; I don't
actually know what the right thing to do is. But I think it's worth
talking about, and hearing from Daniel on how he's feeling about the
feature at this point.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com