Re: 9.6 -> 10.0 - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 4:24 PM, Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> The question is whether others take an interest in doing the same thing for
> pglogical. I suggest that it is more about acceptance of the technology than
> it is about software quality, which is easy to measure. Perhaps that is just
> a matter of time.

Hmm, I don't agree with that.  Craig Ringer said on February 18th that
"I'm not sure anyone takes the pglogical downstream submission as a
serious attempt at inclusion in 9.6".  That was news to me; I had
hoped very much that it was a serious attempt at inclusion in 9.6.
But when I read the patch it became clear pretty quickly that his
statement was accurate.  The patch was not in a state where anyone
could seriously think of committing it, and it had many problems which
obviously could have been fixed prior to submission.  To take just one
example, the documentation was in markdown, not SGML, but more than
that, it would have needed a heavy rewriting to match the style of the
PostgreSQL documentation.  It's not like Craig Ringer and Petr Jelinek
don't know what PostgreSQL documentation needs to look like.  The
code, too, is in need of more work.

On top of that, when various people provided review comments, they
never resulted in an updated patch.  The original post was December
31st.  By January 10th, it had been reviewed by two people.  By
January 17th, they'd both asked for an updated patch to be posted with
a fix for a bug that had been uncovered in review.  More than three
months later, there's still no new patch on that thread.  Yeah,
there's probably updated code in the 2ndQuadrant repository, but
that's never been an acceptable way of submitting an updated patch.
This code may be doing great (or terrible, for all I know) as a
third-party product that works with PostgreSQL, but that's a different
project from making it part of PostgreSQL.

I think it's abundantly clear that there is a consensus for logical
replication in core.  There's more disappointment about the lack of
that feature in this release on this thread than any other.  I, too,
have supported the idea of logical replication in PostgreSQL at every
stage - for example, I wrote
http://rhaas.blogspot.com/2011/02/case-for-logical-replication.html
before I had any idea who might develop such a feature, and I
committed Andres's work on logical decoding.  I believe there is was
real political problem with getting logical replication into
PostgreSQL core in 9.6, and I believe there will be no problem getting
into into core in 9.7, whether as pglogical or in some other form.
There has been no serious opposition to the concept of logical
replication in PostgreSQL core for several years.  But somebody's got
to do the work.  That means somebody's got to submit something that
looks like a committable patch and be prepared to do several rounds of
timely revision of that patch as review comments arrive.  Andres is
willing to review such a patch and I am, too.

So, I think this *is* about software quality.  pglogical didn't miss
9.6 because hate got dumped on it; I would have been delighted to see
it go into 9.6, as that would have been another point in favor of
calling this release 10.0.  It missed 9.6 because of a lack of effort.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company