Message-ID: <473F4C26.3090907@commandprompt.com>
Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2007 12:16:38 -0800
From: "Joshua D. Drake" <jd@commandprompt.com>
Organization: Command Prompt, Inc.
User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.13 (Windows/20070809)
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To: Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>
CC: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, josh@agliodbs.com, pgsql-docs@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Avoiding upgrade backlash
References: <200711171134.lAHBYnt11239@momjian.us>
In-Reply-To: <200711171134.lAHBYnt11239@momjian.us>
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Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com> writes:
>>> Hmmm.  I don't feel like it contains a clear warning, though.  We need a 
>>> statement like:
>>> Some users may encounter issues upgrading due to the changes in handling 
>>> data type casts.  If you suspect that your schema or application may not 
>>> be handling data type comparisons cleanly, you are strongly urged to test 
>>> for casting error messages before upgrading your production server. 
>> When have we ever suggested that people *shouldn't* test their apps
>> before committing to a major version update?
>>
>> I think the whole thing has been significantly overblown.  We have made
>> incompatible changes bigger than this one --- and, often, harder to find
>> let alone fix --- in almost every major release.  This one you can at
>> least be pretty sure that you will get an error, and not a silent change
>> in behavior, if you fall foul of it.
> 
> Agreed.

Honestly, I think you are underestimating this problem. I know that 
every single one of our customers is going to run into this and as much 
as I would like to say otherwise, the world has many more postgresql 
users than I have customers.

This needs to be a dominant statement not only in the release notes but 
in the FAQ and frankly we should be running some up to the release 
announcements on -general and possibly the website about this change, 
how it manifests itself and explicit examples on how to resolve it.

Joshua D. Drake