On Mon, Aug 19, 2024 at 3:30 AM Jelte Fennema-Nio <postg...@jeltef.nl> wrote: > But **now I actually feel much more strongly about reusing the same > function**. Because by introducing a new function we actually break > the users of the second use-case. > > P.S. The docs for PQprotocolVersion[1] have never said that this > function only returns the major protocol version. And by using the > word "Currently" it has always suggested that new return values could > be introduced later, and thus for feature detection you should use >= > 3
If somebody is using PQprotocolVersion() to detect the arrival of a new protocol version, it stands to reason that they only care about new major protocol versions, because that's what the function is defined to tell you about. Anyone who has done a moderate amount of looking into this area will understand that the protocol has a major version number and a minor version number and that this function only returns the former. Therefore, they should expect that the arrival of a new minor protocol version won't change the return value of this function. I really don't understand why we're still arguing about this. It seems to me that we've established that there is some usage of the existing function, and that changing the return value will break something. Sure, so far as we know that something is "only" regression tests, but there's no guarantee that there couldn't be other code that we don't know about that breaks worse, and even there isn't, who wants to break regression tests when there's nothing actually wrong? Now we could decide we're going to do it anyway because of whatever reason we might have, but it doesn't seem like that's what most people want to do. I feel like we're finally in a position to get some things done here and this doesn't seem like the point to get stuck on. YMMV, of course. -- Robert Haas EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
