Re: Upgrading rant.

On Fri, 2003-01-03 at 13:45, mlw wrote:
> Tom Lane wrote:
> 
> >Personally, I feel that if we weren't working as hard as we could on
> >features/performance/bugfixes, the upgrade issue would be moot because
> >there wouldn't *be* any reason to upgrade.

What about the standard Microsoft reason for upgrades - the bug fixes ;)

> > So I'm not planning to
> >redirect my priorities.  But this is an open source project and every
> >developer gets to set their own priorities.  If you can persuade someone
> >to put their time into that, go for it.
> >
> Do not under estimate the upgrade issue.

Very true! If upgrading is hard, users will surely expect us to keep
maintaining all non-upgradable old versions for the foreseeable future
;(

> I think it is huge and a LOT of 
> people have problems with it. Personally, I never understood why the 
> dump/restore needed to happen in the first place.
> 
> Can't the data and index file format be more rigidly defined and stuck 
> too?

I don't think the main issues are with file _formats_ but rather with
system file structures - AFAIK it is a fundamental design decision
(arguably a design flaw ;( ) that we use system tables straight from
page cache via C structure pointers, even though there seems to be a
layer called "storage Manager" which should hide the on-disk format
completely.

> Can't there just be some BKI process to add new data entries? I had 
> the same issues with 7.1 and 7.2,

-- 
Hannu Krosing <hannu@tm.ee>