Melvin Davidson <melvin6925@gmail.com> writes:
> Yes, Stephen, I certainly understand making changes to system catalogs
> _when necessary_. That being said, the first change was the renaming of
> pid to procpid in pg_stat_activity. However, I contend that was more
> because someone felt that it was more to make the column names
> consistent across catalogs, rather than necessity.
Please read all of
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/201106091554.p59Fso314146%40momjian.us
where this was discussed to death (and rejected), and then read all of
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CAKq0gvK8PzMWPv19_o7CGg8ZQ0G%2BUuAWor5RrAg0SOmWTqqLwg%40mail.gmail.com
which is the thread in which the change was agreed to after all
(on the grounds that we were breaking backwards compatibility of
the view anyway with respect to other, more important, columns).
If you still feel that we make incompatible changes without adequate
consideration, that's your right, but you might want to consider
speaking up in some reasonable time frame, not six years later.
This could have been objected to as late as 9.2 beta, so it's not
like you need to be drinking from the pgsql-hackers firehose continually
in order to weigh in. But 9.2 is not just released, it's EOL, so it's
really kinda late to be objecting.
regards, tom lane