Re: Merge from 5.3 and/or 5.4. What's the current policy?

On Fri, 2012-03-30 at 17:22 +0900, Yasuo Ohgaki wrote: > Hi, > > Bug fix can be merged upwards. However, > Are we free to merge feature changes? > > Adding new module constant is new feature. > I certainly would like to have it on 5.4 and it's > probably OK for 5.4, but how about 5.3? > So I'm asking procedure before commit. Either be brave and make a decision yourself or ask for a specific case. For 5.3 the situation is that only bug fixes should go in. There are two reasons for that: * Backwards compatibility. Users must be able to upgrade from 5.3.x to 5.3.(x+1) without thinking about it. Everything must run as before. * Users should have as many reasons as possible to upgrade to a newer version. Now there's of course the old question "what's a bug and what's a feature?" which is hard to answer in some cases. http://blog.zugschlus.de/uploads/bug-feature.jpg Adding a constant can brings two potential compatibility issues. One is that it might require a newer library version and is breaking compatibility there and it might conflict with a name used in a user application. I think on the first one we are quite safe and the second one is also low risk ... and well _not_ adding the constant is a bit ridiculous ;-) All that aside: Two comments on the "feature design": A. A function pg_version() exists, having both, a function pg_version() and a constant PG_VERSION, which do slightly different things is confusing. B. All existing constants use PGSQL_* as prefix. -> Maybe a different name like PGSQL_CLIENT_VERSION is better. johannes