Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Avoiding upgrade backlash

"Joshua D. Drake" <jd@commandprompt.com> writes:
> Honestly, I think you are underestimating this problem.

The reason I'm underestimating the problem is that neither you nor
Josh have provided one iota of evidence to support your position
that the sky is falling.

When I look back at the release notes for the past several major
releases, I see lots of incompatibilities that look far worse than this
one.  In many cases there were fairly subtle semantic changes that would
cause a query to still run, but deliver different answers than before.
Now that is the sort of thing that would maybe justify banners on the
rooftops, but as far as I recall we have always assumed that our users
were adult enough to read the compatibility warnings in the release
notes.

Heck, we have created bigger compatibility problems in *minor* releases;
the security-related tightening of multibyte encoding validity checks
caused a lot more problems for a lot more people (and with a lot less
notice) than I believe this change will do.

What we've got here is a case where certain people who were doing fairly
squirrely things will see errors that compel them to insert explicit
casts to make their intent clear.  This won't even create a backwards
compatibility problem for them: the correctly-casted code will still
work in prior releases too.  To me this looks comparable to, say,
the removal of LIMIT #,# syntax in favor of LIMIT/OFFSET in 7.3.

I fail to see why this is a major problem; and merely asserting that
it is one isn't going to change my mind.  Can you point to something
like a major application that will be broken and can't easily be fixed?

            regards, tom lane