On Wed, Jan 14, 2026 at 3:12 PM Jelte Fennema-Nio <postgres@jeltef.nl> wrote:
> As a maintainer of a proxy, I'd be pretty annoyed if clients start
> sending fields or messages that I don't expect, without *something* in
> the StartupMessage advertising that that will happen. This specific
> patch would be fine for pgbouncer, because it only parses the first
> few fields of the Bind message. But e.g pgcat seems to parse the whole
> Bind message[2]
Yeah... I'm pretty skeptical of the phrase "backwards compatible" in
the way you've used it, Dave. I think that assumes either that
everyone's packet parsers are incredibly lenient, or else that `ERROR:
invalid message format` should be considered a compatible response.
(This ties into my upthread concern that we don't have a good shared
mental model for middlebox compatibility in the protocol.)
--Jacob
