Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> writes: > On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 12:10 PM, Andres Freund <and...@anarazel.de> wrote: >> I'm saying that 10 year deprecation periods don't make sense. Either we >> decide to remove the compat switch because we dislike it for $reasons, >> in which case it should be removed sooner. Or we decide to keep the >> switch indefinitely.
> Forever is an awfully long time. I think that it's OK to remove > backward-compatibility features at some point even if they're not > really harming anything. I think the time before we do that should be > long, but I don't think it needs to be forever. Maybe I shouldn't put words in Andres' mouth, but I don't think that by "indefinitely" he meant "forever". I read that more as "until some positive reason to remove it arrives". I could imagine that at some point we decide to do a wholesale cleanup of backwards-compatibility GUCs, and then we'd zap this one along with others. By itself, though, array_nulls seems about as harmless as such things get. The sum total of the code simplification we'd get from removing it is that the first segment of this if-test would go away: if (Array_nulls && !hasquoting && pg_strcasecmp(itemstart, "NULL") == 0) So there's no plausible argument that it's causing development problems. I am mindful of Josh's frequent complaint that we have too many GUCs, which is a legitimate concern; but removing just one won't do much for that. regards, tom lane -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers