Re: AW: Re: GiST for 7.1 !!

Tom Lane wrote:
>
> Hannu Krosing <hannu(at)tm(dot)ee> writes:
> > That's my vote too, specially if there will be some regression tests
> > accompanying the patches. The current (pre-patch) state of affairs with
> > GiST could probably be described as security-by-obscurity anyhow i.e.
> > "we have't tried it so we think it probably works" ;-)
>
> Au contraire, there *are* a few users of GiST out there now, Gene Selkov
> to name one.

Yes, he is the only one (except Oleg) whom I know to use it too ;)

> So there is a definite risk of breaking things that worked
> in 7.0 and before, in the name of adding new features.

True. Could we ask Gene to test 7.1 with Oleg's patches ?

> If I thought that we had adequate ability to test the new GiST
> implementation during the remaining beta period, I wouldn't be
> so worried. But at this point, Oleg's changes could not appear
> in the beta series before beta4, and between the late date, the
> lack of regression test, and the few interested people to test it,
> I doubt that we'll get any useful coverage.

Or if in fact there _are_ only a few people using it now we could
get _all_ the coverage to be sufficiently sure we don't break anyones
code. GiST being such an obscure and underused feature I'm pretty sure
that most (all?) active users are on Hackers list and read everything
that has GiST in subject.

> I would recommend that Oleg do like Ryan K. did for awhile with the
> Alpha patches: make them available as a set of diffs to be applied
> to the official distribution. We'll be happy to merge them in for
> 7.2, but the calendar says it's too late for 7.1.

Even for the _real_ bugfixes in gist.c ?

----------------
Hannu