Re: Remove Deprecated Exclusive Backup Mode

Greetings,

* Robert Haas (robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com) wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 24, 2019 at 3:00 PM Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:
> > Ok, then please do so, and please be prepared to continue to maintain
> > the documentation of both methods moving forward, because others have
> > tried and have (rightfully, in my opinion) decided that it's frankly not
> > worth the effort and ultimately just terribly confusing for users that
> > we have these two different backup methods and even just updating the
> > documentation for one or the other is downright painful (to the point
> > that people litterally give up on it). That really isn't a good place
> > to be in.
>
> This, to me, is downright rude. You don't get to tell other people
> what to do. Nor do you get to tell other people "hey, I'm going to
> make this change that you don't like unless you agree to do the work
> which I specify." If you want to make a change, you have to build
> consensus for that change. If you can't get people to agree with your
> proposed change, what happens is that you don't get to make that
> change. Whether other people choose to do any work that you and they
> might happen to agree is valuable is up to them.

It wasn't my intent to be rude, and my apologies to you and Christophe
for it coming across that way.

I do think we can ask that people who wish to have a capability included
in PG (or continue to be included when there are serious known issues
with it...) be prepared to either build and maintain it themselves or to
convince someone else to do so (or both, and have a committer agree to
it). That's how we've long operated and it wasn't my intent to imply
otherwise, but I agree that I could have said it in a nicer way to avoid
it coming across as telling Christophe what to do.

I'm also on board with building a consensus for making a change, but a
consensus does not mean that everyone must agree or be supportive of the
change. There's also a practical side to things which is that if the
consensus seems to be "we are going to get rid of X" and someone wants
to work on X, we should probably make it pretty clear to them that
there's a consensus to remove it to allow them the option to decide if
they wish to still work on X, or not. Similairly, I think it's good to
let people know who want to work on Y when Y is really hard, so that
they have some idea what they're getting into.

Thanks!

Stephen