Re: Could postgres be much cleaner if a future release skipped backward compatibility?

On Mon, 19 Oct 2009, Tom Lane wrote:

> Ron Mayer <rm_pg(at)cheapcomplexdevices(dot)com> writes:
>> Would postgres get considerably cleaner if a hypothetical 9.0 release
>> skipped backward compatibility and removed anything that's only
>> maintained for historical reasons?
>
> Yeah, and our user community would get a lot smaller too :-(
>
> Actually, I think any attempt to do that would result in a fork,
> and a consequent splintering of the community. We can get away
> with occasionally cleaning up individual problematic behaviors
> (example: implicit casts to text), but any sort of all-at-once
> breakage would result in a lot of people Just Saying No.

Just curious, but with that thought in mind, are we doing any code
cleanups as far as EOL releases? Ie. is there any code in our tree right
now that is for 'backward compatibility' for 7.3.x versions that could be
cleaned out?

I realize that this might not make a huge difference, but it would be
easier to do a 'gradual clean up', then an 'all-at-once' scenario, no?

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