Re: PG 18 release notes draft committed

On 2025-May-13, Laurenz Albe wrote:

> On the one hand, the catalogs don't promise to be a stable API, so there
> would be no need to enumerate such changes as compatibility breaks.

I think it might be useful to distinguish changes to views, which are
intended to be user-facing, from changes to "internal" catalogs, which
aren't.  I would think that it's reasonable to list changes to system
views in the incompatibility section, but not changes to the system
catalog tables.

As related anecdote, the rename of columns in pg_stat_activity a few
years back caused some pg_upgrade pain, which IMO was understandable;
it's reasonable to call that kind of thing out as a possible
incompatibility, at least IMO.

> The "Migration" section also doesn't list changes to the exported
> PostgreSQL functins, which has bitten me as extension developer several
> times.

Hmm.

-- 
Álvaro Herrera         PostgreSQL Developer  —  https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/
"No me acuerdo, pero no es cierto.  No es cierto, y si fuera cierto,
 no me acuerdo."                 (Augusto Pinochet a una corte de justicia)