Re: parallelizing the archiver

On Thu, Oct 21, 2021 at 11:05 PM Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 21, 2021 at 4:29 PM Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:
> > restore_command used to be in recovery.conf, which disappeared with v12
> > and it now has to go into postgresql.auto.conf or postgresql.conf.
> >
> > That's a huge breaking change.
>
> Not in the same sense. Moving the functionality to a different
> configuration file can and probably did cause a lot of problems for
> people, but the same basic functionality was still available.
>

Yeah.

And as a bonus it got a bunch of people to upgrade their backup software
that suddenly stopped working. Or in some case, to install backup software
instead of using the hand-rolled scripts. So there were some good
side-effects specifically to breaking it as well.

(Also, I'm pretty sure that the recovery.conf changes would have
> happened years earlier if there hadn't been backward compatibility
> concerns, from Simon in particular. So saying that there was "hardly
> any complaint raised" in that case doesn't seem to me to be entirely
> accurate.)
>
> > > Also, more to the point, when there's a need to break backward
> > > compatibility in order to get some improvement, it's worth
> > > considering, but here there just isn't.
> >
> > There won't be any thought towards a backwards-incompatible capability
> > if everyone is saying that we can't possibly break it. That's why I was
> > commenting on it.
>
> I can't speak for anyone else, but that is not what I am saying. I am
> open to the idea of breaking it if we thereby get some valuable
> benefit which cannot be obtained otherwise. But Nathan has now
> implemented something which, from the sound of it, will allow us to
> obtain all of the available benefits with no incompatibilities. If we
> think of additional benefits that we cannot obtain without
> incompatibilities, then we can consider that situation when it arises.
> In the meantime, there's no need to go looking for reasons to break
> stuff that works in existing releases.
>

Agreed.

--
Magnus Hagander
Me: https://www.hagander.net/ <http://www.hagander.net/>
Work: https://www.redpill-linpro.com/ <http://www.redpill-linpro.com/>