Re: CATUPDATE confusion?

On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 6:40 PM, Adam Brightwell
<adam(dot)brightwell(at)crunchydatasolutions(dot)com> wrote:
>> pg_shadow, pg_user and pg_group were added when role support was added,
>> specifically for backwards compatibility. I don't believe there was
>> ever discussion about keeping them because filtering pg_roles based on
>> rolcanlogin was too onerous. That said, we already decided recently
>> that we wanted to keep them updated to match the actual attributes
>> available (note that the replication role attribute modified those
>> views) and I think that makes sense on the removal side as well as the
>> new-attribute side.
>>
>> I continue to feel that we really should officially deprecate those
>> views as I don't think they're actually all that useful any more and
>> maintaining them ends up bringing up all these questions, discussion,
>> and ends up being largely busy-work if no one really uses them.
>
> Deprecation would certainly seem like an appropriate path for 'usecatupd'
> (and the mentioned views). Though, is there a 'formal' deprecation
> policy/process that the community follows? I certainly understand and
> support giving client/dependent tools the time and opportunity to update
> accordingly. Therefore, I think having them read from 'rolsuper' for the
> time being would be ok, provided that they are actually removed at the next
> possible opportunity. Otherwise, I'd probably lean towards just removing
> them now and getting it over with.

Unless some popular tool like pgAdmin is using these views, I'd say we
should just nuke them outright. If it breaks somebody's installation,
then they can always recreate the view on their particular system.
That seems like an adequate workaround to me.

--
Robert Haas
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