Re: Rename backup_label to recovery_control

On Sat, Oct 14, 2023 at 2:22 PM David Steele <david(at)pgmasters(dot)net> wrote:
> I was recently discussing the complexities of dealing with pg_control
> and backup_label with some hackers at PGConf NYC, when David Christensen
> commented that backup_label was not a very good name since it gives the
> impression of being informational and therefore something the user can
> delete. In fact, we see this happen quite a lot, and there have been
> some other discussions about it recently, see [1] and [2]. I bounced the
> idea of a rename off various hackers at the conference and in general
> people seemed to think it was a good idea.

Personally, I feel like this is an area where we keep moving the parts
around but I'm not sure we're really getting to anything better. We
got rid of recovery.conf. We got rid of exclusive backup mode. We
replaced pg_start_backup with pg_backup_start. It feels like every
other release or so we whack something around here, but I'm not
convinced that any of it is really making much of an impact. If
there's been any decrease in people screwing up their backups, I
haven't noticed it.

To be fair, I will grant that renaming pg_clog to pg_xact_status and
pg_xlog to pg_wal does seem to have reduced the incidence of people
nuking those directories, at least IME. So maybe this change would
help too, for similar reasons. But I'm still concerned that we're
doing too much superficial tinkering in this area. Breaking
compatibility is not without cost.

I also do wonder with recovery_control is really a better name. Maybe
I just have backup_label too firmly stuck in my head, but is what that
file does really best described as recovery control? I'm not so sure
about that.

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