Re: vacuum_truncate configuration parameter and isset_offset

On Wed, Mar 26, 2025 at 11:41:13AM -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> What I'm upset about is that it feels to me like Nikolay is trying to
> win the argument by yelling. I don't want that to be the way we do
> things around here. I admit that sometimes it is, and I think that is
> bad, no matter who the yeller is and who is getting yelled at. People
> get upset, including me, and that is life, but whether people are
> upset should never be the determinant of what goes into the tree.

+1

> I have no
> problem with a rational discussion of what the best option is here,
> but I am absolutely not OK with vitriolic rhetoric about how things
> are awful when, AFAICS, nothing has happened here beyond the totally
> routine.

+1

> In a certain sense, the damage here has already been done.
> Nathan has already had to spend a significant amount of time engaging
> with this thread over what I think should be a complete non-event, and
> will probably have to spend more, and all that takes away from time
> that could, for example, be spent reviewing and committing other
> patches. And for what?

I've debated bringing this up, but this has been the most frustrating part
of the discussion for me. While I'm trying to responsibly commit a couple
of other big patches for v18 (for which I am not the primary author), I'm
also spending a huge amount of time trying to have some sort of rational
discussion about a handful of lines of code that seem to work just fine.

FWIW one of the big reasons I didn't proceed with the enum approach
initially is because I worried that I'd end up in a similar discussion
about how terrible _that_ approach is. When I look at that patch [0], I
genuinely wonder if folks would accept that without the isset_offset
context. Maybe I misjudged...

> If it ever happens that the design decision that this patch made
> caused a real problem, some future patch could have reverted it and
> substituted something else and probably nobody would have cared. Even
> now, if some committer other than Nathan cares enough to change
> something here, I doubt that Nathan will really care. But I cannot see
> any world in which pinning Nathan beyond a barrel and demanding action
> is a win for the project overall. If we argued this much about every
> design detail of my patches, I would have quit working on this project
> long ago.

I change others' code all the time, and I fully expect that people will
change my code from time to time, too. The vacuum_truncate code is no
exception. As long as it advances the project in some way, I'm happy.

[0] https://postgr.es/m/attachment/174762/v2-0001-change-vacuum_truncate-relopt-to-enum.patch

--
nathan