Re: Re: Proposed Windows-specific change: Enable crash dumps (like core files)

Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> I am as conservative about back-patching as anybody here, but
> debugging on Windows is not an easy thing to do, and I strongly
> suspect we are going to point people experiencing crashes on Windows
> to this code whether it's part of our official distribution or not. I
> don't see what we get out of insisting that people install it
> separately. This is a tool that is only intended to be used when
> PostgreSQL is CRASHING, so arguing that we shouldn't include the code
> because it might not be stable doesn't carry much water AFAICS. As
> far as I understand it, we don't back-patch new features because of
> the risk of breaking things, but in this case refusing to back-patch
> the code seems more likely to prevent adequate diagnosis of what is
> already broken.

Well, if we're going to hand out prebuilt DLLs to people, we can do that
without having back-patched the code officially. But more to the point
is that it's not clear that we're going to end up with a contrib module
at all going forward (a core feature would clearly be a lot more
reliable), and I really do not wish to get involved with maintaining two
independent versions of this code.

This argument seems to boil down to "we have to have this yesterday",
which I don't buy for a minute. If it's as critical as that, why did
it take this long for someone to write it? I do NOT agree that this
feature is important enough to justify a free pass around our normal
management and quality assurance processes.

regards, tom lane