On Tue, Aug 21, 2018 at 4:28 PM Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:
Hi,
On 2018-08-21 14:23:45 +0000, PG Bug reporting form wrote: > When comparing the current version (10) [1] and the developer version (11) > [2] of the pg_proc documentation, then it can be seen that the > pg_proc.proisagg column was removed backwards incompatibly. The > documentation states for [1]:
Please note that the pg_catalog.* tables (and views) are *NOT* intended to backwards compatible between major versions. We change them in ways backward incompatible all the time.
The pg_catalog tables do seem to be the only way to reverse engineer some more sophisticated things in the database. I imagine that this is being done by tool vendors like myself (jOOQ) quite a bit. And there are tons of Stack Overflow answers that show how to query the pg_catalog tables, all of them risking to be outdated between major versions. These queries are probably used by quite a few people in some home grown build tool, reverse engineering tool, etc.
I understand that backwards compatibility is quite a bit of extra work, but in cases like this particular one, the price to pay seems relatively low. Perhaps a new strategy could be to break things only if there is really no other solution?
