Re: Open 7.3 issues

Tom Lane wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> writes:
> > coming from 7.2 is going to cause problems in 7.3, i.e. do we make
> > assumptions that dependency info is there and in cases it isn't, are
> > there surprises for users, where things worked fine in 7.2.  I want to
> > know if there are cases where we assumed dependency info was there when
> > in 7.2 we handled the lack of depenency better.
> 
> No, we have not broken any cases that used to work, AFAIK.
> 
> There are new features in 7.3 that will not work in a database made from
> a 7.2 dump --- for example, dropping an old table containing a serial
> column won't make the sequence go away, because we won't have a
> dependency link between the table and the sequence.  But it didn't go
> away in 7.2 either, so the behavior's no worse.  Another thing we won't
> understand is that certain sets of triggers make up a foreign-key
> constraint, so you won't be able to use ALTER TABLE DROP CONSTRAINT to
> delete 'em.  But you couldn't in 7.2 either.
> 
> While I've toyed with the notion of trying to intuit these dependencies
> as we reload a database, I'm not at all sure it's a good idea.  The
> former 7.2 user might be quite unhappy if we drop a sequence he wasn't
> expecting to have dropped.  We cannot tell for certain how the sequence
> was made --- it might have been handmade and then used in an explicit
> DEFAULT expression, in which case an auto-drop dependency would probably
> not be a friendly thing to spring on the user.
> 
> The bulk of the new dependencies are made automatically as we handle
> CREATE statements, so they'll be correct in a reloaded database anyway.
> AFAIR it's just serial sequences and foreign keys that are not going to
> be as bright as they might be.

OK, that's what I needed to know.  It may be confusing to some users
that 7.2 serial/foreign keys don't auto-drop while 7.3 do.  We need to
mention that in the release notes.  I think that will be enough, but I
can imagine people dumping/reloading their db's to get that dependency,
and I am not sure how we would tell them to do that.

--  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610)
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