Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> "Erred on the side of progress" might even be a little strong, because
> I think for the most part we have been extremely judicious about
> backward incompatibilities in the last few releases (which is a good
> thing). Obviously, 8.3 was a flag day of the first magnitude, and one
> I hope we won't repeat any time soon, but if you look through the
> release notes for, say, 9.1, just about every "incompatibility" listed
> there amounts to fixing something that was either demonstrably broken
> or widely hated in prior releases.
Well, if you're ragging on the implicit coercions changes, let me point
out that those were also fixing something that was demonstrably broken.
So I'm afraid it's a tad pollyanna-ish to claim that there is never
going to be push-back on changes we choose to make for one or another
of these reasons.
Having said that, though, I agree that we have to be willing to make
incompatible changes from time to time, and I think our standards for
when to do that are plenty high enough already. I'm not in favor of
raising that bar still more. The reason we support back branches as
long as we do is precisely to give people the option to not deal with
incompatible changes until they are ready to. I don't think we need
to do even more, and I don't want to add still more overhead to the
development process to do it.
regards, tom lane