Re: Proposal to allow setting cursor options on Portals

On Thu, 8 Jan 2026 at 01:39, Jacob Champion
<jacob(dot)champion(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
> Dave seems not to be particularly worried about our compatibility with
> third parties. You seem to be hoping to _force_ clients to update,
> even if they disagree with you that they need the new features. I
> think I'm on record as saying these are both bad starting points when
> making changes to a widely implemented protocol. (If not, now I am.)
> That combination will burn hard-earned trust and goodwill.

tl;dr I give up, let's do protocol extensions for everything. I've
updated my GoAway patch do so[1].

I don't think I can convince you that slightly more forceful push
forward that I'm suggesting is worth the gained simplicity (both for
us, users and client authors). And I'm starting to get pretty sick of
discussing the same points over and over again, without making any
progress. So instead of continuing to do so, I'll just agree to
disagree with you.

If in 5 years, when we have 15 protocol extensions with completely
distinct support across clients and proxies instead, and no-one knows
what features they can rely on in practice. While we could have had 5
new protocol versions. I'll just think (and probably tell you) "I told
you so". But you might just be right, and that won't happen, or even
if it does it will somehow be trivial to compare all the compatibility
matrices.

[1]: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/DDPQ1RV5FE9U(dot)I2WW34NGRD8Z(at)jeltef(dot)nl