Received: from localhost (unknown [200.46.204.183]) by postgresql.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BF5012E2D9B for ; Sat, 17 Nov 2007 16:53:02 -0400 (AST) Received: from postgresql.org ([200.46.204.71]) by localhost (mx1.hub.org [200.46.204.183]) (amavisd-maia, port 10024) with ESMTP id 85478-03 for ; Sat, 17 Nov 2007 16:52:59 -0400 (AST) Received: from sss.pgh.pa.us (sss.pgh.pa.us [66.207.139.130]) by postgresql.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B93DF2E2D74 for ; Sat, 17 Nov 2007 16:52:59 -0400 (AST) Received: from sss2.sss.pgh.pa.us (tgl@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by sss.pgh.pa.us (8.14.1/8.14.1) with ESMTP id lAHKqr3G020610; Sat, 17 Nov 2007 15:52:53 -0500 (EST) To: "Joshua D. Drake" cc: Bruce Momjian , josh@agliodbs.com, pgsql-docs@postgresql.org Subject: Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Avoiding upgrade backlash In-reply-to: <473F4C26.3090907@commandprompt.com> References: <200711171134.lAHBYnt11239@momjian.us> <473F4C26.3090907@commandprompt.com> Comments: In-reply-to "Joshua D. Drake" message dated "Sat, 17 Nov 2007 12:16:38 -0800" Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2007 15:52:53 -0500 Message-ID: <20609.1195332773@sss.pgh.pa.us> From: Tom Lane X-Virus-Scanned: Maia Mailguard 1.0.1 X-Archive-Number: 200711/67 X-Sequence-Number: 4600 "Joshua D. Drake" writes: > Honestly, I think you are underestimating this problem. The reason I'm underestimating the problem is that neither you nor Josh have provided one iota of evidence to support your position that the sky is falling. When I look back at the release notes for the past several major releases, I see lots of incompatibilities that look far worse than this one. In many cases there were fairly subtle semantic changes that would cause a query to still run, but deliver different answers than before. Now that is the sort of thing that would maybe justify banners on the rooftops, but as far as I recall we have always assumed that our users were adult enough to read the compatibility warnings in the release notes. Heck, we have created bigger compatibility problems in *minor* releases; the security-related tightening of multibyte encoding validity checks caused a lot more problems for a lot more people (and with a lot less notice) than I believe this change will do. What we've got here is a case where certain people who were doing fairly squirrely things will see errors that compel them to insert explicit casts to make their intent clear. This won't even create a backwards compatibility problem for them: the correctly-casted code will still work in prior releases too. To me this looks comparable to, say, the removal of LIMIT #,# syntax in favor of LIMIT/OFFSET in 7.3. I fail to see why this is a major problem; and merely asserting that it is one isn't going to change my mind. Can you point to something like a major application that will be broken and can't easily be fixed? regards, tom lane