[postgis-devel] PSC Vote: Change PostGIS library name to drop the minor

[Stephen Frost]

Regina,

* Regina Obe (lr at pcorp.us) wrote:
> > I'm a bit on the fence regarding this.  I'm very much in favor of making
> things easier when it comes to the upgrade process, but what I think that
> requires is a firm stance that new versions *don't* change behaviour except
> in > cases of clear bug fixes.  If behaviour changes are going to be
> happening in existing functionality then we simply can't just upgrade users
> to the new version, we need to continue to have a distinction between these
> versions > and that implies a slightly more painful upgrade process.
> 
> > Perhaps we can improve the upgrade process by warning users ahead of time
> in a nicer way than the error pg_upgrade throws today, but I'm not sure what
> that would really look like.

[...]

> But extensions do this all the time and they don't change the lib version
> name.
> 
> Look at plv8 which upped the version, look at hstore, (which added jsonb
> functions, did that change the lib name, no)
> Look at every single pl extension
> 
> These are not bug fixes but totally new functionality.

Adding new functionality isn't changing existing behavior.

> Your argument doesn't make sense to me.  Of course there is a difference and
> people will know it when they do
> 
> SELECT postgis_full_version();

If there's no change to existing behaviour except for clear bug fixes,
then that seems like it would be alright to me, but it wasn't clear to
me that Mark was saying that.  Perhaps we're just talking past each
other here.  Adding new functionality in a new version should be fine to
do, and is how most libraries operate when it comes to versioning.

If there is any chance that a given change will impact the ABI of an
existing function, however, that needs to be handled differently and
made clear so that users aren't upgraded automatically to the new
version.

Hopefully that helps clarify my concern.

Thanks!

Stephen
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