Re: [PATCH] Rename pg_switch_xlog to pg_switch_wal

On Mon, Feb 6, 2017 at 12:29 PM, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> wrote:
>> Here is what I have, 6 votes clearly stated:
>> 1. Rename nothing: Daniel,
>> 2. Rename directory only: Andres
>> 3. Rename everything: Stephen, Vladimir, David S, Michael P (with
>> aliases for functions, I could live without at this point...)
>
> Put my vote down for 2.

I think there is a very strong consensus for going either forward and
renaming everything or going backward and renaming nothing. That
position has been endorsed by me, David Johnston, Tom Lane, Stephen
Frost, Kevin Grittner, Vladimir Rusinov, David Steele, probably
Michael Paquier, and possibly JD. The only people who have explicitly
voted against that position are Andres and Magnus, who prefer renaming
only the directory. I think that's approximately a 7-2 vote in favor
of not leaving things as they are (#2).

The vote on whether to go forward (#3) or backward (#1) is closer.
All of the people mentioned above as wanting consistency - except for
JD whose actual vote wasn't entirely clear - indicated a preference
for #3 over #1, but a number of them prefer it only weakly. Moreover,
Fujii Masao and Daniel Verite prefer #1. But I still think that the
vote is in favor of #3. There are 7 clear votes for that position and
no more than 2 votes for any other position. Even regarding every
vote that isn't for #3 as a vote for #1, which is probably not
entirely accurate, it's still 7-4 in favor of #3.

Looking back at older emails before things came quite so sharply into
focus, I found various other opinions. But I don't think they change
the overall picture very much. Cynthia Shang seemed to favor a more
limited renaming, but her point was that we have lots of internal
stuff that uses the xlog terminology, which isn't quite the same
question as whether the user-visible stuff should all match. David
Fetter favored not adding aliases when we did the renaming, but didn't
clearly spell out that he favored the renaming. Similarly, Euler
Taveira favored aliases in an extension, but likewise didn't clearly
spell out his position on the renaming itself. (I would tend to count
those as votes in favor of the renaming itself but you could argue
that.) Bruce Momjian wanted to go forward to keep things clean.
Simon Riggs wanted to leave things as they are, but the reason given
was not so much about the merits of the issue but about not wanting to
spend more time on it. You can come up with different counts
depending on exactly how you interpret what all of those people said,
but not even the least favorable allocation of those votes ends up
with anything other than #3 as the most popular option.

Therefore, I plan to go ahead and do #3. Somebody's probably going to
jump in now with another opinion but I think this thread's gone on
long enough. We're going to take some backward-compatibility pain
here as a result of these changes and some people are going to be
unhappy about that, but I think we've allowed enough time for people
to weigh in with opinions and this seems to be where we're at.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company