Re: Is a heads-up in 9.1 in order regarding the XML-related changes in 9.2?

On Jul28, 2011, at 01:28 , Tom Lane wrote:
> Florian Pflug <fgp@phlo.org> writes:
>> Is there an establishes practice for situations like this, i.e. a behavior-
>> changing bug-fix committed to X.Y+1 before X.Y is released?
>
> Generally, we do nothing.  It's a bit premature (in fact a lot
> premature) to assume that the current behavior of HEAD is exactly what
> will be released in 9.2, but putting statements about it into 9.1 docs
> would amount to assuming that.  It's the job of the 9.2 release notes
> to point out incompatibilities, not the job of the 9.1 docs to guess
> what will happen in the future.

Fair enough.

> If you think that the incompatibilities in question are so earth-shaking
> as to require retroactive advance warnings, maybe we should reconsider
> whether they're a good thing to do at all.

Certainly not earth-shaking, no. Also an obvious improvement, and probably
equally likely to fix existing applications as they are to break them. So
let's by all means not revert them.

I simply though that putting a warning about XPATH() escaping deficiencies
might save some people the trouble of (a) finding out about that the hard
way and (b) developing work-arounds which are bound to be broken by 9.2.

I'm not saying we must absolutely do so - heck, I'm not even totally
convinced myself that we even should do so. I simply happened to realize
today that the timing was a bit unfortunate, figured it wouldn't hurt to
get additional opinions on this, and thus asked.

best regards,
Florian Pflug