On 16 November 2011 01:09, Joshua Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com> wrote:
> People are already using ISN (or at least ISBN) in production. It's been around for 12 years.
contrib/isn has been around since 2006. The argument "some unknowable
number of people are using this feature in production" could equally
well apply to anything that we might consider deprecating.
I am not arguing for putting isn on PGXN. I'm arguing for actively
warning people against using it, because it is harmful. Any serious
use of the ISBN datatypes can be expected to break unpredictably one
day, and the only thing that someone can do in that situation is to
write their own patch to contrib/isn. They'd then have to wait for
that patch to be accepted if they didn't want to fork, which is a very
bad situation indeed. This already happened once.
--
Peter Geoghegan http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training and Services