On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 9:47 AM, Greg Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Mar 2008, Gurjeet Singh wrote: > > >> This project doesn't make functional changes to stable releases, that's > >> the reason why 8.2 will never get patched to add the %r feature. > > I completely understand that, but still was hoping that we'd change > that. > > Well, then you really don't understand this at all then, so let's work on > that for a bit. http://www.postgresql.org/support/versioning is the > official statement, perhaps some examples will help clarify where and why > the line is where it is. > > One of the first patches I ever submitted made a minor change to a contrib > utility used solely for benchmarking (pgbench) that added a useful > feature, only if you passed it the right parameter. That was considered > for a tiny bit before being rejected as a feature change too large to put > into a stable branch. > > That was a small change in a utility that should never be run on a > production system. You're trying to get a change made to the code path > people rely on for their *backups*. Good luck with that. > > The parable I enjoy pulling out in support of this policy is MySQL bug > #31001: > > > http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/10/04/mysql-quality-of-old-and-new-features/ > > where they added a seemingly minor optimization to something and > accidentally broke the ability to sort in some cases. There's always a > small risk that comes with any code change, and this is why you don't ever > touch working production code unless you're fixing a bug that's more > troublesome than that risk. > > Point well taken. And when I said 'I completely understand that', I meant I understood Postgres' policy for patching older releases. And thanks for the links; it feels good to know that there's an "official" stand on this topic in Postgres, rather than 'no known serious bugs'. :) I am still looking for comments on the correctness of this script and above mentioned procedure for running it on an 8.2.x release. Thanks and best regards, -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] gmail | hotmail | indiatimes | yahoo }.com EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com Mail sent from my BlackLaptop device