Re: Remove Deprecated Exclusive Backup Mode

David Steele <david(at)pgmasters(dot)net> writes:

> On 2/25/19 12:35 AM, Christophe Pettus wrote:
>>
>>
>>> On Feb 24, 2019, at 14:19, Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:
>>> You say above that the new interface is unquestionably an improvement
>>> and here say that we shouldn't deprecate the old one in favor of it
>>> (even though we actually already have... but that's beside the point I'm
>>> trying to make here), so what you're advocating for is that we keep an
>>> old and known broken interface that we know causes real issues even
>>> after we've developed a new and unquestionably better one.
>>
>> Yes, I am advocating exactly that. The reason that I think we need
>> to keep the old one (or, at least, not remove it as soon as 12)...
>
> Exclusive backup will not be removed for PG12. There wasn't support for
> it so I push it out to PG13.

How about making the deprecation more obvious in PG12, by making
pg_start_backup() in exclusive mode issue a WARNING that it will be
removed in PG13?

We had a similar problem in Perl, where we got pushback for removing
deprecated features because they had been deprecated for so long (in
some cases over 20 years) with no sign of actually being removed. We
alleviated this by making all deprecation warnings include the version
in which the feature would be removed (at least two major versions after
the one where the versioned warning was introduced).

Having this sort of clarity about what deprecation actually constitutes
is also useful when deciding whether to deprecate or merely discourage a
feature.

My two minor currency units,

- ilmari
--
"A disappointingly low fraction of the human race is,
at any given time, on fire." - Stig Sandbeck Mathisen