Re: [PATCH] remove deprecated v8.2 containment operators

Greetings,

* Magnus Hagander (magnus@hagander.net) wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 12, 2020 at 11:28 PM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> > > The changes to the contrib modules appear to be incomplete in some ways.
> > >   In cube, hstore, and seg, there are no changes to the extension
> > > scripts to remove the operators.  All you're doing is changing the C
> > > code to no longer recognize the strategy, but that doesn't explain what
> > > will happen if the operator is still used.  In intarray, by contrast,
> > > you're editing an existing extension script, but that should be done by
> > > an upgrade script instead.
> >
> > In the contrib modules, I'm afraid what you gotta do is remove the
> > SQL operator definitions but leave the opclass code support in place.
> > That's because there's no guarantee that users will update the extension's
> > SQL version immediately, so a v14 build of the .so might still be used
> > with the old SQL definitions.  It's not clear how much window we need
> > give for people to do that update, but I don't think "zero" is an
> > acceptable answer.
> 
> Based on my experience from the field, the answer is "never".
> 
> As in, most people have no idea they are even *supposed* to do such an
> upgrade, so they don't do it. Until we solve that problem, I think
> we're basically stuck with keeping them "forever". (and even if/when
> we do, "zero" is probably not going to cut it, no)

Yeah, this is a serious problem and one that we should figure out a way
to fix or at least improve on- maybe by having pg_upgrade say something
about extensions that could/should be upgraded..?

Thanks,

Stephen