On Mon, Feb 25, 2019 at 11:09 AM Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> wrote:
> I do think we can ask that people who wish to have a capability included
> in PG (or continue to be included when there are serious known issues
> with it...) be prepared to either build and maintain it themselves or to
> convince someone else to do so (or both, and have a committer agree to
> it). That's how we've long operated and it wasn't my intent to imply
> otherwise, but I agree that I could have said it in a nicer way to avoid
> it coming across as telling Christophe what to do.
I think it is certainly true that if you want a new capability added,
you have to either write it yourself or get someone to do it for you.
There is SOME precedent for the proposition that if you want an
obsolete capability not to be removed, you should be prepared to help
fix it. But frankly I think the latter proposition is one we've taken
only occasionally, and only for things that were a whole lot cruftier
and more problematic than this is. For example, if a library is no
longer available and we have a contrib module that depends on that
library, it's reasonable to say that we can't keep the contrib module
unless somebody rewrites it not to depend on that library any more.
But the current situation is completely different. The code
maintenance burden resulting from keeping exclusive-mode backups is
mostly hypothetical; the code works as well as it ever did. We rarely
take the position that we're going to rip out older code that doesn't
work as nicely as newer code does just because nobody's prepared to
e.g. better-document the old code.
For example, we still have FEBE protocol 2 support floating around.
If you're going to talk about badly-designed footguns that ought to be
excised with extreme prejudice, that would IMHO be a far better place
to start than this. Unlike this code, which it's now obvious is used
by quite a number of people even just among those who read this list
regularly, that code is probably nearly unused and untested and, if we
broke it, we probably wouldn't know.
--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company