On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 4:38 AM, Craig Ringer <cr...@2ndquadrant.com> wrote: > Implicit casts to text, anybody?
This backward compatibility break orphaned the company I work for on 8.1 until last year and very nearly caused postgres to be summarily extirpated (only rescued at the last minute by my arrival). It cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to qualify a sprawling java code base so that it could be moved back into a supported version. Breaking compatibility sucks -- it hurts your users and costs people money. Hacking type casts may not have been a mistake, but the arbitrary introduction of the breakage certainly was. This project has no deprecation policy, and I'd argue we'd need one before considering breaking changes. For example, maybe we could pull out an occasional release for longer term support to help users that caught out. But really, the better way to go IMNSHO is to take a hard line on compatibility issues pretty much always -- consider the case of libc and win32 api. There are certain limited exceptions to this rule -- for example security problems or gross violations of the standard (bringing row-wise comparison to spec comes to mind as an example of that). merlin -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
