Subject: Re: PSA: Planning to grease protocol connections during 19beta

From: Jacob Champion <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2026 12:00:49 -0800

On Tue, Dec 9, 2025 at 5:16 PM Jacob Champion
<[email-masked]> wrote:
> I want to make sure this doesn't take anyone by surprise: I'm planning
> to get Jelte's "grease" patch into shape for a commit some time in
> January.

As of January 54th, this is committed.

I wanted to get people's thoughts on communication. As it stands now,
beta users will be directed towards our own documentation [1] when
they hit a grease failure. But personally, I'd like the landing page
to be on the wiki, for several reasons:

- It can be written in a more casual voice, and go into detail that
would be out of place in a docs note
- It's easier to change quickly in response to end user feedback, if
we receive any
- It can remain in place after the beta period ends

But having libpq link to a wiki page makes that page a vandalism
target. Can a wiki page be protected in a way that still lets
committers edit it? Is there a third option that works better than the
docs or the wiki?

--Jacob

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/libpq-connect.html#LIBPQ-CONNECT-MAX-PROTOCOL-VERSION

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From: Tom Lane <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2026 15:20:13 -0500

> committers edit it? Is there a third option that works better than the

We have the ability to lock down a wiki page, but I believe that means
nobody can edit it until a wiki admin unlocks it.  That might be the
way to go here though.  I concur with your reasoning that the main
docs are a less-good place.

			regards, tom lane

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From: Jacob Champion <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2026 08:30:37 -0800

> docs are a less-good place.

Okay, sounds good. I've created
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Grease for now; I'll work on filling
it in. I think FAQ-style might work well for this format.

--Jacob

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From: Jacob Champion <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 May 2026 11:49:34 -0700

On Wed, May 6, 2026 at 8:05 AM Jacob Champion
<[email-masked]> wrote:
> > I would definitely prefer that to be the landing page (assuming it can be locked down).
>
> Sounds good; I will ask around.

Joe did this for us [1] -- thanks Joe! -- and I've pushed the commit
to link to it.

So: thanks everybody! Now we get to see if anything happens.

--Jacob

[1] https://postgr.es/m/72dd6202-3346-40b3-be3e-7ae22f914302%40joeconway.com

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From: Jelte Fennema-Nio <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2026 10:03:55 +0200

On Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 20:58 Jacob Champion <[email-masked]>
wrote:

> Something I'm struggling with is whether (and how) to have people let
> us know when they've hit this, so that we know that the campaign is
> working. I have some language to that effect in the "What do I need to
> do?" section, but I don't really know what list I should point to, if
> any, nor what they should say so that they don't confuse the list
> regulars. I'm considering removing that part of the call to action.
>

I think it'd be good if they notify us too. So we can get a sense of
whether it's "safe enough" to bump the protocol version at some point
and/or we can bug important offenders that we have some sway over. How
about adding something like this to the wiki page:

Please also report the issue to the pgsql-hackers mailinglist using the
[grease] tag at the start of the subject and include a link to the upstream
issue (if it's on a public issue tracker). As an example:

To: [email-masked]
Subject: [grease] ExampleProxy fails grease check
Body:
I'm using ExampleProxy and it's failing the grease check. I've reported the
issue upstream at https://example.com/issues/1234

---

From: Jacob Champion <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2026 11:38:00 -0700

On Wed, Jun 3, 2026 at 1:04 AM Jelte Fennema-Nio <[email-masked]> wrote:
> I think it'd be good if they notify us too. So we can get a sense of whether it's "safe enough" to bump the protocol version at some point and/or we can bug important offenders that we have some sway over. How about adding something like this to the wiki page:
>
> Please also report the issue to the pgsql-hackers mailinglist using the [grease] tag at the start of the subject and include a link to the upstream issue (if it's on a public issue tracker). As an example:
>
> I'm using ExampleProxy and it's failing the grease check. I've reported the issue upstream at https://example.com/issues/1234

Thanks! Something like that seems reasonable to me, yeah.

Any objections here to making -hackers the landing point? I wouldn't
want to do that for a released feature, but for a beta-only thing, I
feel like the audience will be small enough to avoid accidentally
DoSing ourselves.

--Jacob

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From: Jelte Fennema-Nio <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2026 21:30:42 +0200

> feel like the audience will be small enough to avoid accidentally

If it becomes too noisy we can change the page to suggest people to
report it some other way Another option would be to dedicate a wiki
page to it, but wiki edit permissions are non-trivial to get these
days. I prefer making it easy for people to report issues to us,
unless it becomes an actual problem.

---

From: Jacob Champion <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2026 08:16:20 -0700

On Wed, Jun 3, 2026 at 12:30 PM Jelte Fennema-Nio <[email-masked]> wrote:
> report it some other way

Yep! Hearing no objections so far, I'll copy-edit a version of your
suggestion this morning and send it to the wiki admins.

Thanks!
--Jacob

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From: Jacob Champion <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2026 13:48:17 -0700

> suggestion this morning and send it to the wiki admins.

Done. Thank you!

--Jacob