Re: Support for QNX6, POSIX IPC and PTHREAD-style locking

Igor Kovalenko writes:

> Fair enough. I am asking you to get something into 7.2 for practical
> reasons. Sooner people will get something, sooner someone will uncover
> problems is there are any. That would allow to have reasonable confidence by
> the time 7.3 rolled out.

The patch looks mostly harmless in the sense that it doesn't break
anything else, although some parts are clearly bogus, such as the patches
to 'configure' and 'resultmap' and some "comment out if you want xyz"
comments where there's nothing to comment out nearby. (Plus, commenting
stuff in and out in makefiles is not an acceptable practice to spread.)
CFLAGS in template/qnx6 should probably be -O2 unless you have reasons to
do otherwise, which should be documented. LIBS= has no business in the
template file. Overriding CC as done in port/qnx6/Makefile is not valid.
The SHLIB_LINK line in Makefile.shlib is not possibly correct. (The same
goes for most of the other SHLIB_LINK lines there, btw.) These issues are
"mostly harmless", but they would need to be fixed.

My mind on this is that we hope to put out the first *release candidate*
this week, which means, "if there are no more serious bugs, this is the
final release". This would mean that this patch would receive virtually
*no* testing before release. Surely I trust your word that says that this
patch makes PostgreSQL run correctly on your system, and it doesn't look
like it'll break anything else. But this kind of reasoning is not
responsible. PostgreSQL is, for better or worse, not developed by proving
that the code is theoretically correct; we allocate for extensive beta
testing because we know we need extensive beta testing. Exceptions are
always made, but a new feature has never qualified for such an exception.

"There will always be another release."

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net