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

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Tom Lane replied to Ron Mayer:
>> 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.

That particular example is a very poor one for illustrating your
point. You severely underestimate "get away with" for the implicit
cast changes in 8.3. This was a really big deal for many, many users
of Postgres, and continues to cause many problems to this day.

I'm sure the casting changes broke more applications and prevented more
people from upgrading than every thing on Ron's list for a clean 9.0 would.
Not that I'm necessarily promoting his idea, but 8.3 was already a
"all-at-once breakage" release.

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg(at)turnstep(dot)com
End Point Corporation
PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 200910201005
http://biglumber.com/x/web?pk=2529DF6AB8F79407E94445B4BC9B906714964AC8
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