Re: Could postgres be much cleaner if a future release skipped backward compatibility?

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 10:07 AM, Greg Sabino Mullane <greg(at)turnstep(dot)com> wrote:
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> Tom Lane replied to Ron Mayer:
>>> Would postgres get considerably cleaner if a hypothetical 9.0 release
>>> skipped backward compatibility and removed anything that's only
>>> maintained for historical reasons?
>>
>> Yeah, and our user community would get a lot smaller too :-(
>>
>> Actually, I think any attempt to do that would result in a fork,
>> and a consequent splintering of the community.  We can get away
>> with occasionally cleaning up individual problematic behaviors
>> (example: implicit casts to text), but any sort of all-at-once
>> breakage would result in a lot of people Just Saying No.
>
> That particular example is a very poor one for illustrating your
> point. You severely underestimate "get away with" for the implicit
> cast changes in 8.3. This was a really big deal for many, many users
> of Postgres, and continues to cause many problems to this day.
>
> I'm sure the casting changes broke more applications and prevented more
> people from upgrading than every thing on Ron's list for a clean 9.0 would.
> Not that I'm necessarily promoting his idea, but 8.3 was already a
> "all-at-once breakage" release.

This is a fair point. I think the real issue, though, is that answer
to Ron's original question is "No". When backward compatibility gets
in the way of cool new features, that's worth considering. But
removing backward compatibility just for the sake of removing backward
compatibility doesn't really buy us anything. It's basically doing
extra work for no benefit and some possible harm.

...Robert