On Mon, Feb 25, 2019 at 11:33 AM Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> wrote:
> > Removing an option that people are currently using, and which they
> > find better than other available options for reasons with which I
> > understand that you disagree, will make users more sad. Happy is
> > better.
>
> I don't want to see more users stumbling over the issues with the
> exclusive backup interface. A better interface exists, and has existed
> since 9.6. The exclusive backup method was deprecated in 2016. One of
> the really bad things about the exclusive backup method is that it
> *looks* like it works well and that there aren't any issues with it, but
> when users hit the issues, they get very sad. We might have 1000s of
> happy users who never run into those issues and therefore don't want to
> see us change anything, but what about the 10s or 100s of users who do
> hit those issues, what do we tell them? Seems like we're saying "well,
> sorry, we knew those issues existed and it's unfortunate you hit them,
> but there's this better thing that you *should* have been using and then
> you wouldn't have hit those issues." That doesn't seem likely to make
> people happy with us.
Sure, nobody wants users to keep hitting the same problems over and
over again, but the above is still reductionist. If we take the view
that anything that can cause data corruption in any scenario, no
matter how remote, is more than everything else, then we should just
stop shipping minor releases and halt all other development work until
we deal with https://commitfest.postgresql.org/22/528/ that has been
open for 14 CommitFests and until we've fully dealt with every aspect
of fsync-gate. I don't see you treating either of those issues with
the same sense of urgency with which you're treating this one, so
evidently you feel entitled to decide which
potentially-data-corrupting issues you want to attack first.
And I agree that you should have exactly that right. Along similar
lines, I'd like our users to have the right to decide when they want
to upgrade from using exclusive backup mode to non-exclusive backup
mode, instead of being forced into making a change at a time decided
by our fiat.
--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company