David Fetter wrote:
As background, I'd like to go over our policy of, "The code patch must be accompanied by any doc patches that it implies."
Although it is worth noting this policy is not religiously followed anyway (e.g. the recent roles patch). I think we basically assume that the person contributing a code patch is on the hook to write the docs at some point before the next release, unless they can convince someone else to do it for them.
Where the rule now reads, The code patch must be accompanied by any doc patches that it implies. It should read, The code patch must be accompanied by any doc patches *and any needed upgrade transformations* that it implies.
I think this misses the point. The hurdle that needs to be cleared for pg_upgrade is to write the infrastructure needed to migrate the system catalogs and data directories from one release to another in a reliable way. Once that is done, then yes, subsequent system catalog modifications would need to include the necessary changes to the upgrade infrastructure to make pg_upgrade continue to work. But until we have pg_upgrade in the first place, the requirement you state above could be simplified to "no changes that would require an initdb", which is obviously a non-starter.
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