Re: A deprecation policy

Tom Lane wrote:
> Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> writes:
> > I have been thinking, with a semi-formal deprecation policy, we could 
> > make these decisions with more confidence.  My proposed policy goes like 
> > this:
> 
> I've been thinking about this for a couple of hours, and I keep coming
> back to the conclusion that if we actually enforced a policy like this
> it would kill Postgres development dead.  It already takes more than a
> year, on average, for a proposal to go from idea to out-in-the-field.
> This policy would add another two years onto that for anything that
> involved user-visible changes, which is most things.  All but the most
> persistent developers are simply going to go away and not bother trying
> to shepherd their ideas through such a process.
> 
> I can see the value of a more formal deprecation policy, but I think
> it's gotta have a shorter time constant than this.

Agreed.  Consider the downside of having to support two different APIs
for two releases, and document them.  Yuck.

There are some cases where a 2-release buffer is warranted, others where
it is not.

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
 + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +