Re: GUC_REPORT for protocol tunables was: Re: Optimize binary serialization format of arrays with fixed size elements

On tis, 2012-01-24 at 20:13 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Yeah.  In both cases, the (proposed) new output format is
> self-identifying *to clients that know what to look for*.
> Unfortunately it would only be the most anally-written pre-existing
> client code that would be likely to spit up on the unexpected
> variations.  What's much more likely to happen, and did happen in the
> bytea case, is silent data corruption. 

The problem in the bytea case is that the client libraries are written
to ignore encoding errors.  No amount of protocol versioning will help
you in that case.