Re: v12 and pg_restore -f-

Greetings,

* Peter Eisentraut (peter(dot)eisentraut(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com) wrote:
> On 2019-11-04 15:53, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> >>No, I'm not proposing a full revert. But there's certainly room to
> >>consider reverting the part that says you*must* write "-f -" to get
> >>output to stdout.
> >I don't think this will buy us anything, if we get past branches updated
> >promptly.
>
> Users with with hundreds or thousands of servers and various ancient
> maintenance scripts lying around in hard-to-track ways are not going be able
> to get everything upgraded to the latest minors *and* new script versions
> any time soon. Until they do, they are effectively blocked from introducing
> PG12 into their environment. This is very complicated and risky for them.
> I think we should revert the part that requires using -f - at least for
> PG12.

Absolutely not. This argument could be made, with a great deal more
justification, against the changes to remove recovery.conf, and I'm sure
quite a few other changes that we've made between major versions over
the years, but to do so would be to hamstring our ability to make
progress and to improve PG.

We don't guarantee this kind of compatibility between major versions.
Those users have years to address these kinds of changes, that's why we
have back-branches and support major versions for 5 years.

Thanks,

Stephen