Re: [PATCH] Rename pg_switch_xlog to pg_switch_wal

Andres,

* Andres Freund (andres@anarazel.de) wrote:
> On 2017-02-09 15:53:47 -0500, Stephen Frost wrote:
> > * Josh Berkus (josh@berkus.org) wrote:
> > > What I'm voting against is the idea that we'll have aliases in core, but
> > > remove them in two releases.  Either that's unrealistic, or it's just
> > > prolonging the pain.
> > 
> > Waiting 10+ years doesn't make the pain go away when it comes to
> > removing things like that.
> 
> That's ridiculous. I think we can fairly argue whether backward compat
> is worth it, but claiming that migrations to something new aren't easier
> if there's a number of versions that support both the old and the new
> names/syntax/whatnot is obviously wrong.

We do provide a number of years of overlap- 5 years in fact.  I believe
that's an entirely good thing and gives our users a chance to manage
their upgrade paths from one major release to the next.

Increasing that overlap to 10 or 15 years, however, doesn't make a
hill-of-beans worth of difference, in my opinion.  Either they're
tracking the releases that we're doing and making changes and adapting
as we change things, or they aren't and won't ever unless they're forced
to, instead preferring to make us carry the burden of maintenance on the
backwards-compat pieces.

Thanks!

Stephen