Re: Make description of heap records more talkative for flags

> On May 15, 2018, at 12:50 PM, Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:
> 
> On 2018-05-15 13:44:58 -0400, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
>> On 2018-Apr-23, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
>> 
>>> Now, frankly, this being mostly a debugging tool, I think it would be
>>> better to have the output as complete as we can.  Otherwise, when
>>> debugging some hideous problem we find ourselves patching the tool
>>> during an emergency in order to figure out what is going on.  For this,
>>> I would rather patch the earliest version we conveniently can.  We
>>> cannot patch pg10 because it's already out there, but not so for pg11.
>> 
>> RMT, I would like your opinion on whether to apply a fix for this
>> problem to pg11 or not.
> 
> -0.1. We've lived without this for years, I fail to see why this should
> get an exception / has any sort of urgency. We could establish a policy
> that we just exclude parts of the source tree from the code freeze, but
> we haven't so far.

Per Alvaro’s above comment, if this is something low-risk that could prevent
the “emergency patch” scenario later on when we actually need such
debugging flags in place, I would be ok with getting this in prior to Beta 1.
After Beta 1 I would be more risk adverse and go with Andres’s statement
around urgency and wait until the PG12 commit cycle.

And of course, we should come up with a policy, too, but I think we could
kick that can just a bit farther down the road for roughly 2 more weeks.

So +1 if we can commit this prior to Beta 1.
-1 if it waits until after.

Jonathan