Re: [HACKERS] Removal of deprecated views pg_user, pg_group, pg_shadow

On Thu, Feb 9, 2017 at 8:54 PM, Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> wrote:
> Note that these views have not been consistently maintained and have
> ended up including some role attributes from recent versions

That's not a bug.  According to the documentation, these views exist
for compatibility with PostgreSQL versions before 8.1, so there's no
need to update them with newer fields.  Clients who are expecting to
talk with a pre-8.1 PostgreSQL won't expect those fields to be present
anyway.

My big objection to removing these views is that it will break pgAdmin
3, which uses all three of these views.  I understand that the pgAdmin
community is now moving away from pgAdmin 3 and toward pgAdmin 4, but
I bet that pgAdmin 3 still has significant usage and will continue to
have significant usage for at least a year or three.  When it's
thoroughly dead, then I think we can go ahead and do this, unless
there are other really important tools still depending on those views,
but it's only been 3 months since the final pgAdmin 3 release.

IMHO, these views aren't costing us much.  It'd be nice to get rid of
them eventually but a view definition doesn't really need much
maintenance.  (A contrib module doesn't either, but more than a view
definition.)

-- 
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company