Re: Lets (not) break all the things. Was: [pgsql-advocacy] 9.6 -> 10.0

On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 01:43:41PM -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> I'm going to throw down the gauntlet (again) and say more or less what
> I previously said on the pgsql-advocacy thread. I think that:
>
> 1. Large backward compatibility breaks are bad. Therefore, if any of
> these things are absolutely impossible to do without major
> compatibility breaks, we shouldn't do them at all.
>
> 2. Small backward compatibility breaks are OK, but don't require doing
> anything special to the version number.
>
> 3. There's no value in aggregating many small backward compatibility
> breaks into a single release. That increases pain for users, rather
> than decreasing it, and slows down development, too, because you have
> to wait for the special magic release where it's OK to hose users. We
> typically have a few small backward compatibility breaks in each
> release, and that's working fine, so I see little reason to change it.

Well, this is true for SQL-level and admin-level changes, but it does
make sense to group pg_upgrade breaks into a single release. I think
the plan is for us to have logical replication usable before we make
such a change.

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

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