Re: Is a UDF binary portable across different minor releases and PostgreSQL distributions?

From: "Tsunakawa, Takayuki" <tsunakawa(dot)takay(at)jp(dot)fujitsu(dot)com>
To: Craig Ringer <craig(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>
Cc: "pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org" <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: Is a UDF binary portable across different minor releases and PostgreSQL distributions?
Date: 2016-07-01 07:24:20
Message-ID: 0A3221C70F24FB45833433255569204D1F59DC39@G01JPEXMBYT05
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From: pgsql-hackers-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org [mailto:pgsql-hackers-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org] On Behalf Of Craig Ringer
There's no formal extension API. So there's no boundary between "internal stuff we might have to change to fix a problem" and "things extensions can rely on not changing under them". In theory anything that changed behaviour or changed a header file in almost any way could break an extension.

There's no deliberate breakage and some awareness of possible consequences to extensions, but no formal process. I would prefer that the manual explicitly recommend recompiling extensions against each minor update (or updating them along with the packages), and advise that packagers make their extensions depend on an = minor version in their package specifications, not a >= .

Yes, I think such recommendation in the manual is the best.

However, in practice it's fine almost all the time.

Maybe most extensions don’t use sensitive parts of the server…

I think making this more formal would require, as Tom noted, a formal extension API we can promise to maintain, likely incorporating:
- ... endlessly more

Endless (^^;)

The main thing is that it's a great deal of work for limited benefit. I don't know about you, but I'm not keen.

I’m not keen, either… I don’t think I can form the API that advanced extension developers will be satisfied with. I’ll just document the compabibility article in the upgrade section.

Regards
Takayuki Tsunakawa

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