Re: libpq API incompatibility between 7.4 and 8.0

Tom Lane wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:
> >> In short, fixing this the way Bruce wants to will be a nontrivial amount
> >> of effort.
>
> > psql actually calls get_progname(). Do we know that it will try to link
> > in the other functions from path.c? I am unsure.
>
> I don't know of any commonly used linkers that link at granularity finer
> than one source file, and in any case for shared libraries the library
> is all-or-nothing.
>
> Grep shows that 7.4 psql does reference is_absolute_path, and 7.4
> pg_dumpall does reference last_path_separator, so at least three of the
> four are at issue.

Ewe, yep, that is a mess.

OK, so how will we handle this? We will bump the major for 8.0.X.

Do we also hack libpq/Makefile to remove the 8.0.0 libpq? If not, then
RPM folks will need to relink, but source installs will not, but they
will have to remove the 8.0.0 libpq if they also want to run 7.4.

As you can see it is the confusion that bothers me. I am not sure how I
would write a coherent paragraph explaining this.

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