On Sat, Oct 14, 2023 at 11:33 AM David Steele <da...@pgmasters.net> wrote: > All of this is fixable in HEAD, but seems incredibly dangerous to back > patch. Even so, I have attached the patch in case somebody sees an > opportunity that I do not.
I really do not think we should be even thinking about back-patching something like this. It's clearly not a bug fix, although I'm sure that someone can try to characterize it that way, if they want to make the well-worn argument that any behavior they don't like is a bug. But that's a pretty lame argument. Usage errors on the part of users are not bugs, even if we've coded the software in such a way as to make those errors more likely. I think what we ought to be talking about is whether a change like this is a good idea even in master. I don't think it's a terrible idea, but I'm also not sure that it's a good idea. The problem is that if you're doing the right thing with your backup_label, then this is unnecessary, and if you're doing the wrong thing, then why should you do the right thing about this? I mean, admittedly you can't just ignore a fatal error, but I think people will just run pg_resetwal, which is even worse than starting from the wrong checkpoint. I feel like in cases where a customer I'm working with has a bad backup, their entire focus is on doing something to that backup to get a running system back, whatever it takes. It's already too late at that point to fix the backup procedure - they only have the backups they have. You could hope people would do test restores before disaster strikes, but people who are that prepared are probably running a real backup tool and will never have this problem in the first place. Perhaps that's all too pessimistic. I don't know. Certainly, other people can have experiences that are different than mine. But I feel like I struggle to think of a case where this would have prevented a bad outcome, and that makes me wonder whether it's really a good idea to complicate the system. -- Robert Haas EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com