Greg Smith <greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> Doing this presumes the existence of a large number of tools where
> the author is unlikely to be keeping up with PostgreSQL
> development. I don't believe that theorized set of users actually
> exists.
There could be a number of queries used for monitoring or
administration which will be affected. Just on our Wiki pages we
have some queries available for copy/paste which would need multiple
versions while both column names were in supported versions of the
software:
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Lock_dependency_information
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Lock_Monitoring
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Backend_killer_function
I agree that these are manageable, but not necessarily trivial.
(You should see how long it can take to get them to install new
monitoring software to our centralized system here.) I think that's
consistent with the "save up our breaking changes to do them all at
once" approach.
-Kevin