Re: Feature Request: pg_replication_master()

On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 02:29:49PM -0500, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Let me also add that I am tired of having recovery.conf improvement
> stalled by backward compatibility concerns. At this point, let's just
> trash recovery.conf backward compatibility and move on.
>
> And I don't want to hear complaints about tool breakage either. These
> are external tools, not shipped with community Postgres, and they will
> just have to adjust. I will be glad to beat all complainants into the
> ground for the good of the community. ;-) We just can't operate like
> this, and if we allowed these things to block us in the past, Postgres
> would be a royal mess today!
>
> At this point backward compatibility has paralized us from fixing a
> recovery.conf API that everyone agrees is non-optimal, and this has
> gone on for multiple major releases. I don't care what we have to do,
> just clean this up for 9.3!

Let me add two more things. First, no matter how many people you
interact with who use Postgres, there are many more who you do not
interact with. Please don't give excessive weight to those people you
know, or who use your tools, or who are your customers, and forget the
many more Postgres users who you will never know. They are not using
your tools or scripts --- they just want Postgres to be simple to use.

Second, no matter how successful Postgres is now, there are many more
users in our future, and we have a responsibility to give them a
database that is as easy to configure as possible, without hampering
them with decisions to avoid disruption for current Postgres users.

I am not saying we should ignore current users, or our customers or our
tool users, but it is very clear to me that we have lost the proper
balance in this area.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

+ It's impossible for everything to be true. +