Re: State of Beta 2

On Sat, 20 Sep 2003, Tom Lane wrote:

> "Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@postgresql.org> writes:
> > On Fri, 19 Sep 2003, Tom Lane wrote:
> >> I think we could definitely adopt a policy of "on-disk changes not
> >> oftener than every X releases" if we had a working pg_upgrade,
>
> > 'K, but let's put the horse in front of the cart ... adopt the policy so
> > that the work on a working pg_upgrade has a chance of succeeding ... if we
> > said no on disk changes for, let's say, the next release, then that would
> > provide an incentive (I think!) for someone(s) to pick up the ball and
>
> No can do, unless your intent is to force people to work on pg_upgrade
> and nothing else (a position I for one would ignore ;-)).  With such a
> policy and no pg_upgrade we'd be unable to apply any catalog changes at
> all, which would pretty much mean that 7.5 would look exactly like 7.4.

No, I'm not suggesting no catalog changes ... wait, I might be wording
this wrong ... there are two changes that right now requires a
dump/reload, changes to the catalogs and changes to the data structures,
no?  Or are these effectively inter-related?

If they aren't inter-related, what I'm proposing is to hold off on any
data structure changes, but still make catalog changes ... *if*, between
v7.4 and v7.5, nobody can bring pg_upgrade up to speed to be able to
handle the catalog changes without a dump/reload, then v7.5 will require
one ... but, at least it would give a single 'moving target' for the
pg_upgrade development to work on, instead of two ...

Make better sense?