Re: pgbench and timestamps (bounced)

Hello Tom,

>>> Hi, this entry is "Waiting on Author" and the thread was inactive for a
>>> while. I see this discussion still has some open questions. Are you
>>> going to continue working on it, or should I mark it as "returned with
>>> feedback" until a better time?
>
>> IMHO the proposed fix is reasonable and addresses the issue.
>> I have responded to Tom's remarks about it, and it is waiting for his
>> answer to my counter arguments. So ISTM that the patch is currently still
>> waiting for some feedback.
>
> It looks like my unhappiness with injecting a pthread dependency into
> pgbench is going to be overtaken by events in the "option delaying
> queries" thread [1].  However, by the same token there are some conflicts
> between the two patchsets, and also I prefer the other thread's approach
> to portability (i.e. do it honestly, not with a private portability layer
> in pgbench.c).  So I'm inclined to put the parts of this patch that
> require pthreads on hold till that lands.

Ok. This is fair enough. Portability is a pain thanks to Windows vs MacOS 
vs Linux approaches of implementing or not a standard.

> What remains that we could do now, and perhaps back-patch, is point (2)
> i.e. disallow digits as the first character of a pgbench variable name.

I'm fine with that.

> That would be enough to "solve" the original bug report, and it does seem
> like it could be back-patched, while we're certainly not going to risk
> back-patching anything as portability-fraught as introducing mutexes.

Sure.

I'm unable to do much pg work at the moment, but this should be eased 
quite soon.

> [1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/20200227180100.zyvjwzcpiokfsqm2%40alap3.anarazel.de

-- 
Fabien Coelho - CRI, MINES ParisTech