Re: pg_standby for 8.2 (with last restart point)

On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 9:47 AM, Greg Smith <gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com> wrote:

> On Fri, 28 Mar 2008, Gurjeet Singh wrote:
>
> >> This project doesn't make functional changes to stable releases, that's
> >> the reason why 8.2 will never get patched to add the %r feature.
> > I completely understand that, but still was hoping that we'd change
> that.
>
> Well, then you really don't understand this at all then, so let's work on
> that for a bit. http://www.postgresql.org/support/versioning is the
> official statement, perhaps some examples will help clarify where and why
> the line is where it is.
>
> One of the first patches I ever submitted made a minor change to a contrib
> utility used solely for benchmarking (pgbench) that added a useful
> feature, only if you passed it the right parameter. That was considered
> for a tiny bit before being rejected as a feature change too large to put
> into a stable branch.
>
> That was a small change in a utility that should never be run on a
> production system. You're trying to get a change made to the code path
> people rely on for their *backups*. Good luck with that.
>
> The parable I enjoy pulling out in support of this policy is MySQL bug
> #31001:
>
>
> http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/10/04/mysql-quality-of-old-and-new-features/
>
> where they added a seemingly minor optimization to something and
> accidentally broke the ability to sort in some cases. There's always a
> small risk that comes with any code change, and this is why you don't ever
> touch working production code unless you're fixing a bug that's more
> troublesome than that risk.
>
>
Point well taken. And when I said 'I completely understand that', I meant I
understood Postgres' policy for patching older releases. And thanks for the
links; it feels good to know that there's an "official" stand on this topic
in Postgres, rather than 'no known serious bugs'. :)

I am still looking for comments on the correctness of this script and above
mentioned procedure for running it on an 8.2.x release.

Thanks and best regards,
--
gurjeet[(dot)singh](at)EnterpriseDB(dot)com
singh(dot)gurjeet(at){ gmail | hotmail | indiatimes | yahoo }.com

EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com

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