Re: DROP relation IF EXISTS Docs and Tests - Bug Fix

On Wed, Aug 11, 2021 at 5:54 AM Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> Yeah. I tend to feel like this is the kind of thing where it's not
> likely to be 100% obvious to users how it all works no matter what we
> put in the documentation, and that some of the behavior of a system
> has to be learned just by trying out the system.
>

I see where you are coming from and agree with a good portion of it, and
accept that you are accurately representing reality for most of the rest,
regardless of my feelings on that reality. I'm not invested in this enough
to try and change mindsets. I have withdrawn the patch from the commitfest
and do not plan on putting forth a replacement.

Thank you for your thorough review, I do appreciate it. It did reaffirm
some of the suspicions I had about the wording I had chosen at least.

I will add that when I finished the patch I felt it was of more value to
future developers than it would be to our end users. I never really
worried that a patch could be written to fill in the missing pieces that
prompted the various bug reports. I went to the extra effort because the
underlying interactions seemed complicated and I wanted to see in practice
exactly how they behaved and what that meant for usability. I also still
disagree with our choice to emit an error on a namespace collision, and
generally feel this area could use improvement. Thus I keep the tests
around, which basically communicate that "this is how things work and it is
intentional" and also are useful to have should future changes, however
unlikely to materialize, be made. Sure, that isn't "regression" but in my
unfamiliarity I didn't know of a better existing place to put them and
didn't think to figure out (or create) a better location, one that doesn't
run on every build.

David J.