Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> writes:
> On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 06:34:27PM +0100, Vik Fearing wrote:
>> Unfortunately, I gave up on it as being over my head when I noticed I
>> was changing the protocol itself. I should have notified the list so
>> someone else could have taken over.
> OK, so that brings up a good question. Can we change the protocol for
> this without causing major breakage? Tom seems to indicate that it can
> be done for 9.4, but I thought protocol breakage was a major issue. Are
> we really changing the wire protocol here, or just the type of string we
> can pass back to the interface?
What I said about it upthread was "this is effectively a protocol change,
albeit a pretty minor one, so I can't see back-patching it".
The discussion in bug #7766 shows that some client-side code is likely to
need fixing, and that such fixing might actually be nontrivial for them.
So changing this in a minor release is clearly a bad idea. But I don't
have a problem with widening the counters in a major release where we
can document it as a potential compatibility issue.
I took a quick look and noted that CMDSTATUS_LEN and
COMPLETION_TAG_BUFSIZE are set to 64, and have been for quite a long time,
so command status string buffer sizes should not be a problem.
I think we probably just need to widen es_processed and touch related
code. Not sure what else Vik saw that needed doing.
regards, tom lane