Re: Toward pg_upgrade

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.

-Neil