Re: pg_class.relistemp

> As one of said vendors, I completely disagree.

I don't agree that you qualify as a vendor. You're on the friggin' core
team.

I'm talking about vendors like DBVizualizer or TORA, for which
PostgreSQL is just one of the databases they support. If stuff breaks
gratuitously, the reaction of some of them is always to either drop
support or delay it for a year or more. This doesn't benefit our community.

> There are a ton of
> things that change with each release, and all we do by putting in
> hacks for backwards compatibility is add bloat that needs to be
> maintained, and encourage vendors to be lazy.

I don't agree that having comprehensive system views with multi-version
stability would be a "hack".

> Break compatibility is actually something that is important to us - it
> forces us to fix obvious issues, and makes it much harder to
> inadvertently miss important changes.

What I'm hearing from you is: "Breaking backwards compatibility is
something we should do more of because it lets us know which vendors are
paying attention and weeds out the unfit." Is that what you meant to say?

That seems like a way to ensure that PostgreSQL support continue to be
considered optional, or based on outdated versions, for multi-database
tools.

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com