Re: ISN was: Core Extensions relocation

Peter Geoghegan <peter(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> On 17 November 2011 02:32, Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
>> Right. Do we need to dump the hyphen logic?

> Only if you think that it's better to have something that covers many
> cases but is basically broke. Perhaps it's different for code that is
> already committed, but in the case of new submissions it tends to be
> better to have something that is limited in a well-understood way
> rather than less limited in a way that is unpredictable or difficult
> to reason about.

Well, as was stated upthread, we might have bounced this module in toto
if it were submitted today. But contrib/isn has been there since 2006,
and its predecessor contrib/isbn_issn was there since 1998, and both of
those submissions came from (different) people who needed the
functionality bad enough to write it. It's not reasonable to suppose
that nobody is using it today. Ergo, we can't just summarily break
backwards compatibility on the grounds that we don't like the design.
Heck, we don't even have a field bug report that the design limitation
is causing any real problems for real users ... so IMO, the claims that
this is dangerously broken are a bit overblown.

regards, tom lane