On Thu, Aug 11, 2016 at 5:24 PM, Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> wrote: > You argue against > these things on the grounds that they might change later, but the > overwhelming evidence from posts on this list is that people would > prefer to have access to APIs that might not be stable rather than > have no access at all.
I don't think it's useful to take this ultimatum approach. I would say abstraction boundaries are a fairly well-proven C.S. tool at this point -- and indeed by sometime last century. The real question is where do the benefits outweigh the costs and that's going to be a question of balancing conflicting priorities. Not one where an ultimatum is justified. So the real question is, are index access methods a place where we want to take short cuts and just expose internals or is this a place where we should spend the effort to design good abstractions? At face value it certainly seems like a line worth defending but historically it's been a kind of half-hearted abstraction since it was never clear what new access methods might need and how to abstractly define every possible attribute they might have. And the push away from SQL defined attributes seems to be conceding defeat on that front. -- greg -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
