On Wed, 2018-12-12 at 13:31 +0900, Robert Haas wrote: > On Wed, Dec 12, 2018 at 1:23 PM David Steele <da...@pgmasters.net> wrote: > > I didn't get the impression that Peter was against, he just thought that > > it needed to stand on its own, rather than be justified by the > > recovery.conf changes, which I agree with. > > > > Simon rather clearly said that he thinks we should wait until the next > > release, which I don't see as being entirely against. > > Well, nobody is saying that we should NEVER remove this. The > discussion is about what to do in v12. > > Most of the features I've been involved in removing have been > deprecated for 5+ years. The first release where this one was > deprecated was only 2 years ago. So it feels dramatically faster to > me than what I think we have typically done. > > Actually, I hadn't realized until this discussion that the exclusive > backup interface was actually deprecated -- I thought we were just > recommending the new non-exclusive backup interface should be used. > If we're in a rush to remove this (and apparently many of us are), I > think we should make that warning a lot more prominent, maybe copy it > into a few more places, and back-patch the changes.
+1 I too only learned about this recently, while the problem with exclusive backups has been known at least since 2008 (c979a1fe), and nobody felt this to be a terrible problem back then. I believe that the danger is greatly overrated. It is not like you end up with a corrupted database after a crash, and you get a pretty helpful error message. Many people are happy enough to live with that. I'm on board with deprecating and removing it eventually, but I see no problem in waiting for the customary 5 years. And yes, a prominent warning in the next major release notes would be a good thing. Yours, Laurenz Albe
