Re: Remove Deprecated Exclusive Backup Mode

On Mon, Feb 25, 2019 at 8:42 AM Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> wrote:
> Alright, then how about we provide a bit of help for everyone who's got
> a system built around recovery.conf today, instead of just completely
> ripping that out?
>
> If we're happy to do that then I really can't agree with these arguments
> that there's things we should try to maintain when it comes to
> interfaces, and that's far from the only example of a pretty massive
> change that just went into version X with zero notice to users about
> what they're using today being deprecated.

It's not the same thing.  First of all, the recovery.conf changes have
been under discussion for quite a few years now, whereas this change
has been under discussion for only a few months.  It is also worth
noting that those recovery.conf changes would've been made years ago
if people hadn't objected to breaking backward compatibility; people
have just as much of a right to object to these changes on those
grounds as they did to those changes.  Second, the recovery.conf
changes are intended to provide a tangible benefit - namely, getting
the recovery.conf settings into the GUC system, so that they can be
queried and changed using methods available for other GUCs.  But the
change proposed here breaks things for people who are using the
mechanism in question and it doesn't give them anything else instead.
Indeed, it seems quite obvious that you don't have the LEAST interest
in putting any effort into actually making things in this area better
for users; it appears that you just want to break what they're doing
now and shove the work of coping with those changes onto them.
Christophe is quite right to question whether that will cause users
not to upgrade.  I think it's overtly user-hostile.  You have referred
to the effort of maintaining this code, but you haven't pointed to any
tangible improvement that you'd like to make in this area that is
actually being blocked by the existence of exclusive backup mode.
It's all just griping about how terrible the whole thing is, and it
seems that there are actually quite a few people here who find it less
terrible than you think it is.

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