Re: 9.3 Beta1 status report

On 04/24/2013 06:34 PM, Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
>>>> Let me clarify --- changes to our WAL binary format and source code
>>>> changes are not really incompatibilities from a user perspective as we
>>>> never promise to do our best to minimize such changes  --- m eaning
>>>> the
>>>> fact the WAL format changed is something that would be only in the
>>>> source code section and not in the "incompatibilities section"  ---
>>>> incompatibilities are related to change in user experience or
>>>> documented-API changes.
>>>
>>> These guidelines makes sense, except I think the change in naming
>>> standard of xlog segments is important to document clearly because,
>>> even
>>> if we have not promised compatibility, people could be relying on it in
>>> scripts.  I think it makes sense to waste a couple of lines documenting
>>> this change, even if we expect the number of people to be bitten by it
>>> to be very low.
>
> Right. Kevin mentioned he had a script that knew about the numbering:
> http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/4FD09B5E020000250004818B@gw.wicourts.gov.
>

We also have scripts that know about the missing FF.  How slim are the
chances of having pg_xlogdump output the version of the wal file for
9.3?  I know we're right on top of the deadline, but that tool and this
change are both new to 9.3. That way our scripts could know if a file is
missing or not.

I talked about this briefly with Andres on IRC and he says a patch to do
this would be trivial.

Thoughts?