Re: Deprecating RULES

On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 3:24 PM, Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
> Daniel,
>
>> Unfortunately I myself see little evidence of the vast, vast --
>> several nines of vast -- majority of folks using rules, and as I said:
>> as a thought experiment, merely one solved bug is worth more to me
>> than rules from what I know at this time.
>
> Again, the answer to this is to run an aggressively promoted survey, so
> that we can have data, rather than speculation by -hackers.

I think that's great, but I am cynical enough to believe that after
such surveys that we should be prepared to turn back if the insertion
of a deprecation warning into Postgres generates more data (e.g.
complaints). I'm quite happy with long and even uncertain process,
depending on what happens, deprecation may have to put off for a very
long time.

I don't usually like to push so insistently, but I felt inclined to
because I did not feel that, in the beginning, that those proposing
that we even talk about the idea got a very evenhanded response. Your
sentiments may vary, but I feel this is a justified one, now.

>> Finally, putting aside the use cases you are able to positively
>> identify from your personal experirence, I think it's reasonable to
>> put in a message of intent-to-deprecate and reverse or revise course
>> as more data appears. Perhaps the thinking should be: "intent to
>> aggressively gather data to enable deprecation" rather than "a final
>> deprecation decision and plan, full stop."
>
> Exactly.
>
> I fact, I'll go further and say that I believe we will be deprecating
> RULEs eventually. It's merely a question of how long that will take and
> what we need to document, announce and implement before then.
>
> I would tend to say "well, they're not hurting anyone, why not keep
> them?" Except that we're gathering an increasing number of features
> (RETURNING, FDWs, CTEs, Command triggers) which don't work well together
> with RULEs. That puts us in danger of turning into MySQL ("Sorry, you
> can't use Full Text Search with transactions"), which is not a direction
> we want to go in.

Sounds very reasonable to me. Also, contains some good reasons for
deprecation I had not thought of.

--
fdr