Re: Could postgres be much cleaner if a future release skipped backward compatibility?

* Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> [091019 18:45]:
> Ron Mayer <rm_pg(at)cheapcomplexdevices(dot)com> writes:
> > Would postgres get considerably cleaner if a hypothetical 9.0 release
> > skipped backward compatibility and removed anything that's only
> > maintained for historical reasons?
>
> Yeah, and our user community would get a lot smaller too :-(
>
> Actually, I think any attempt to do that would result in a fork,
> and a consequent splintering of the community. We can get away
> with occasionally cleaning up individual problematic behaviors
> (example: implicit casts to text), but any sort of all-at-once
> breakage would result in a lot of people Just Saying No.

I don't know... What if this hypothetical "baggage-free" version came
with configurable syncrhonous master-slave replication, writable CTEs,
and everything ;-)

Couple it with a libpq/protocol increase that allows fixing of the
various warts of the current connection (like encoding, etc), and you
still have a *very* attractive platform...

And then just do the rename official to Postgres, and people can support
both PostgreSQL, warts and all, or Postgres, the super-duper
database-to-rule-them-all...

;-)

/me crawls back into his hole

a.

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