Re: Add new protocol message to change GUCs for usage with future protocol-only GUCs

On Thu, Apr 18, 2024 at 5:36 PM Jelte Fennema-Nio <me(at)jeltef(dot)nl> wrote:
> To clarify: My proposed approach is to use a protocol extension
> parameter for to enable the new messages that the server can send
> (like Peter is doing now). And **in addition to that** gate the new
> Bind format type behind a feature switch. There is literally nothing
> clients will have to do to "support" that feature (except for
> requesting a higher version protocol). Your suggestion of not bumping
> the version but still allowing the new format type on version 3.0
> doesn't have any advantage afaict, except secretly hiding from any
> pooler in the middle that such a format type might be sent.

That's a fair point, but I'm still not seeing much practical
advantage. It's unlikely that a client is going to set a random bit in
a format parameter for no reason.

> As a connection pooler maintainer I would definitely love it if every
> protocol change required either a protocol version parameter or a
> protocol version bump. That way I can easily check every release if
> the protocol changed by looking at two things, instead of diffing the
> protocol docs for some tiny "supposedly irrelevant" change was made.

Perhaps this is the root of our disagreement, or at least part of it.
I completely agree that it is important for human beings to be able to
understand whether, and how, the wire protocol has changed from one
release to another. I think it would be useful to document that, and
maybe some agreement to start actually bumping the version number
would come out of that, either immediately or eventually. But I don't
think bumping the protocol version first is going to help anything. If
you know that something has changed at least one time in the release,
you still have to figure out what it was, and whether there were any
more of them that, presumably, would not bump the protocol version
because there would be no good reason to do that more than once per
major release. Not only that, but it's entirely possible that someone
could fail to realize that they were supposed to bump the protocol
version, or have some reason not to do it in a particular instance, so
even if there are no bumps at all in a particular release cycle, that
doesn't prove that there are no changes that you would have liked to
know about.

Said differently, I think bumping the protocol version should be,
first and foremost, a way of telling the computer on the end of the
connection something that it needs to know. There is a separate
problem of making sure that human maintainers know what they need to
know, and I think we're doing that quite poorly right now, but I think
you might be conflating those two problems a bit.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com