[postgis-devel] RFC versus Direct Action

[Sandro Santilli]

On Tue, Feb 08, 2022 at 11:53:44AM -0800, Paul Ramsey wrote:
> I think there are places where an RFC is called for, and the spatial ref sys view work is one where it would have been much appreciated. I do not particularly enjoy being the "bad guy" and the guy who is saying "yes, you have spatial a couple weeks sweating over this but I still think it's a bad idea and you shouldn't have" is more-or-less definitionally the bad guy. A role I would not have had to take on, had this been brought forward as an RFC prior to dumping a bunch of effort into it. I also would not have to make this my sudden priority, and presumably now generate alternate code in order to match up to Sandro's "yes, you have an idea, but I have code" position in this tete a tete.
> 
> https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/postgis-devel/2022-February/029433.html
> 
> It's too late to wind back the situation, since the time has already been spent and the layout is as it is, but I do feel unnecessarily backed into a corner and throwing up my hands and saying "oh, heck, whatever" seems like a non-optimal place for me to be vis a vis the project, psychologically.

Paul, I don't intend to push the change if it doesn't
make everyone happy.

The time I spent on it served the purpose of
understanding the issue better. I learnt that:

  - Different PostGIS upgrade systems have different policies
    when it comes to spatial_ref_sys:

    - Soft upgrades (extension or script) do not touch
      spatial_ref_sys at all, leaving full control of the
      data in that table to the user

    - Hard upgrades (pg_restore) will discard any entry from
      dumps that have a SRID already present in the target
      database spatial_ref_sys

  - Users are willing to have a documented way to upgrade
    their spatial_ref_sys data

  - Users are expecting (or hoping?) their custom entries to
    not be thrown away.

I've deleted the "spatial-ref-sys-view" branch from the official
repository, so we can then discuss in a less "pushy" way.

--strk;

  Libre GIS consultant/developer
  https://strk.kbt.io/services.html