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

On Mon, Aug 19, 2024 at 3:30 AM Jelte Fennema-Nio <postgres(at)jeltef(dot)nl> wrote:
> But **now I actually feel much more strongly about reusing the same
> function**. Because by introducing a new function we actually break
> the users of the second use-case.
>
> P.S. The docs for PQprotocolVersion[1] have never said that this
> function only returns the major protocol version. And by using the
> word "Currently" it has always suggested that new return values could
> be introduced later, and thus for feature detection you should use >=
> 3

If somebody is using PQprotocolVersion() to detect the arrival of a
new protocol version, it stands to reason that they only care about
new major protocol versions, because that's what the function is
defined to tell you about. Anyone who has done a moderate amount of
looking into this area will understand that the protocol has a major
version number and a minor version number and that this function only
returns the former. Therefore, they should expect that the arrival of
a new minor protocol version won't change the return value of this
function.

I really don't understand why we're still arguing about this. It seems
to me that we've established that there is some usage of the existing
function, and that changing the return value will break something.
Sure, so far as we know that something is "only" regression tests, but
there's no guarantee that there couldn't be other code that we don't
know about that breaks worse, and even there isn't, who wants to break
regression tests when there's nothing actually wrong? Now we could
decide we're going to do it anyway because of whatever reason we might
have, but it doesn't seem like that's what most people want to do.

I feel like we're finally in a position to get some things done here
and this doesn't seem like the point to get stuck on. YMMV, of course.

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