Re: Remove Deprecated Exclusive Backup Mode

On 2/25/19 11:38 PM, Andres Freund wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 2019-02-25 09:24:32 -0800, Christophe Pettus wrote:
>> But the resistance to major version upgrades is *huge*, and I'm
>> strongly biased against anything that will make that harder.  I'm not
>> sure I'm communicating how big a problem telling many large
>> installations, "If you move to v12/13/etc., you will have to change
>> your backup system" is going to be.
> 
> I think you might be right about this specific issue. But to me it
> sounds like you also don't appreciate that development resources are
> really constrained too, and providing endless backward compatibility for
> everything is going to use both resources directly, and indirectly by
> making the whole system more complex.  I've been on your side of this
> fight a couple times (and largely lost), but I think it's important to
> appreciate that it's all a balancing, and we all have valid reasons to
> keep the balance between development pace / ease of use / ease of
> upgrade the way we argue for them. Hard upgrading is going to reduce
> adoption, but so is lack of feature development and too many creaky &
> redundant & easy to misuse interfaces.

+1.

And those (like me) who are motivated to work in this area are put off 
by the byzantine code and how easy it is to break things -- in large 
part because of the *complete* absence of tests for exclusive mode.

I did a round of doc updates for non/exclusive backups a while back and 
it was excruciating to measure and document the subtle differences in a 
way that a user might possibly understand.  I'm honestly not motivated 
to come back to it until we remove the deprecated interfaces.

-- 
-David
david@pgmasters.net