Re: Disallow arrays with non-standard lower bounds

On 1/13/14, 10:40 AM, Merlin Moncure wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 4:38 AM, Craig Ringer<craig(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
>> >Implicit casts to text, anybody?
> This backward compatibility break orphaned the company I work for on
> 8.1 until last year and very nearly caused postgres to be summarily
> extirpated (only rescued at the last minute by my arrival). It cost
> hundreds of thousands of dollars to qualify a sprawling java code base
> so that it could be moved back into a supported version. Breaking
> compatibility sucks -- it hurts your users and costs people money.
> Hacking type casts may not have been a mistake, but the arbitrary
> introduction of the breakage certainly was.

IMHO, I see no reason we need to plan on removing support. Presumably it's not that much burden on our codebase; it's only a PITA for users writing correct code. (It'd be very interesting to see how much user code would blow up if presented with anything other than 1 as the lower bound...)

I'd be perfectly happy with an initdb option to allow for lower bound support if you wanted it and disable it by default. People the legitimately want/need <> 1 lower bounds can set that up, but our general user population will end up protected from a class of heisenbugs.
--
Jim C. Nasby, Data Architect jim(at)nasby(dot)net
512.569.9461 (cell) http://jim.nasby.net