Re: 10.0

On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 05:48:30PM -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
> On 06/16/2016 11:01 PM, Craig Ringer wrote:
> >
> > I thought about raising this, but I think in the end it's replacing one
> > confusing and weird versioning scheme for another confusing and weird
> > versioning scheme.
> >
> > It does have the advantage that that compare a two-part major like
> > 090401 vs 090402 won't be confused when they compare 100100 and 100200,
> > since it'll be 100001 and 100002. So it's more backward-compatible. But
> > ugly.
>
> Realistically, though, we're more likely to end up with 10.0.1 than
> 10.1. I don't think we're anywhere near plumbing the depths of the
> stuff which will break because folks are parsing our version numbers
> with regexes. In more major software, this will break nagios
> check_postgres.
>
> I'm not happy with it, but I believe that's where we'll end up.

Pulling back a bit from this a bit, I am pretty sure that the fix for
the new announced version numbers, so long as our new policy is clear
and won't be changed again for the foreseeable future has the
following characteristics:

- Not a show-stopper, i.e. people will not drop support in their
products for PostgreSQL over this.

- A Matter of Programming that really is small. The difference
between the old three-part/six-digit version encoding and the new
two-part/four-digit version encoding is stark and simple, as is the
code to handle it, even if it's regex. By the time we get to
PostgreSQL 100.0, the first starship will already be back, and the
9.x PostgreSQLs will be in older to people using them then that the
Zuse Z1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse is to us now.

Just my $.02.

Cheers,
David.
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
Phone: +1 415 235 3778 AIM: dfetter666 Yahoo!: dfetter
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