Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2022 09:32:08 -0800
From: Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>
To: Chapman Flack <chap@anastigmatix.net>
Cc: David Steele <david@pgmasters.net>, pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Postgres restart in the middle of exclusive backup and the
 presence of backup_label file
Message-ID: <20220301173208.GB1031413@nathanxps13>
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On Tue, Mar 01, 2022 at 11:09:13AM -0500, Chapman Flack wrote:
> On 03/01/22 09:44, David Steele wrote:
>> Personally, I am in favor of removing it. We change/rename
>> functions/tables/views when we need to, and this happens in almost every
>> release.
> 
> For clarification, is that a suggestion to remove the 'exclusive' parameter
> in some later release, after using this release to default it to false and
> reject calls with true?

My suggestion was to remove it in v15.  My impression is that David and
Stephen agree, but I could be misinterpreting their responses.

> That way, at least, there would be a period of time where procedures
> that currently work (by passing exclusive => false) would continue to work,
> and could be adapted as time permits by removing that argument, with no
> behavioral change.

I'm not sure if there's any advantage to kicking the can down the road.  At
some point, we'll need to break existing backup scripts.  Will we be more
prepared to do that in v17 than we are now?  We could maintain two sets of
functions for a few releases and make it really clear in the documentation
that pg_start/stop_backup() are going to be removed soon (and always emit a
WARNING when they are used).  Would that address your concerns?

-- 
Nathan Bossart
Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com