Re: [HACKERS] Happy column dropping

On Sat, 22 Jan 2000, Tom Lane wrote:

> Bruce Momjian <pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:
> >> Okay, my turn here ... I vote for this to be *reverted*!!
>
> > I disagree. First, it is on the TODO list, so it is open game. Second
> > it is not throughout all the code, it only gets activated if someone
> > executes the command. Third, I don't know of any time limit that
> > features have to be implemented a certain number of weeks _before_ beta
> > starts.
>
> I agree with Bruce. There's no risk of this breaking anything else,
> AFAICT, so if it doesn't work there's no harm done. I hope Peter is
> going to clean it up more before beta, but why shouldn't he push out
> what he has for review and criticism?

Why didn't I just take Alfred's stuff and shove it into the source tree
and let the bricks fall where they may? As far as I am/was concerned, the
ramifications of the changes were so great that *some* discussion should
have happened before hand ...

I'm one of those that would love to have an ALTER TABLE ... DROP COLUMN
implementation, but how many applications will get broken because OID are
no longer retained? If it had been brought up and discussed before being
thrown in, like everyone else has done in the past, maybe a better
solution could have presented itself ...

> I'm busy committing changes in areas that are considerably more critical
> than this is, so if the rule is going to be "no risk taken for N weeks
> *before* beta", better tell me about it...

Its not the *risk* that bothers me, its the lack of discussions ... IMHO,
he should have brought up the "I'm in the process of toasting the reliance
on OIDs" topic *before* implementing it ... give other ppl a chance to
possibly present alternatives ...

Marc G. Fournier ICQ#7615664 IRC Nick: Scrappy
Systems Administrator @ hub.org
primary: scrappy(at)hub(dot)org secondary: scrappy(at){freebsd|postgresql}.org