Robert Haas wrote:
Well it seems that what we're trying to implement is more like it_would_be_nice_if_you_would_start_syncing_this_file_range_but_its_ok_if_you_dont(), so maybe that would work. Anyway, is there something that we can agree on and get committed here for 9.0, or should we postpone this to 9.1? It seems simple enough that we ought to be able to get it done, but we're running out of time and we don't seem to have a clear vision here yet...
This is turning into yet another one of those situations where something simple and useful is being killed by trying to generalize it way more than it needs to be, given its current goals and its lack of external interfaces. There's no catversion bump or API breakage to hinder future refactoring if this isn't optimally designed internally from day one.
The feature is valuable and there seems at least one spot where it may be resolving the possibility of a subtle OS interaction bug by being more thorough in the way that it writes and syncs. The main contention seems to be over naming and completely optional additional abstraction. I consider the whole "let's make this cover every type of complicated sync on every platform" goal interesting and worthwhile, but it's completely optional for this release. The stuff being fretted over now is ultimately an internal interface that can be refactored at will in later releases with no user impact.
If the goal here could be shifted back to finding the minimal level of abstraction that doesn't seem completely wrong, then updating the function names and comments to match that more closely, this could return to committable. That's all I thought was left to do when I moved it to "ready for committer", and as far as I've seen this expanded scope of discussion has just moved backwards from that point.
-- Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant Baltimore, MD PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support greg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx www.2ndQuadrant.com -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance
