On Wed, Jan 14, 2026 at 2:16 PM Jelte Fennema-Nio <postgres@jeltef.nl> wrote:
> All changes in those 3 additional patches look totally reasonable to me.
Thanks, I'll plan to squash those in v5, and probably kick 0005 out
into its own thread to give people a chance to object even if they're
ignoring the grease stuff.
> > I'd like reserve a (protected?) wiki page, or something of the sort,
> > that we can point people to directly if they hit any grease failures.
> > "Server screwed up" is probably not enough context for a typical user
> > to know what to do next.
>
> Seems sensible to have a place to explain something to authors. Why not
> put it directly in the protocol docs though? (I'd be fine with a wiki
> too, but a docs page is protected by definition)
At the moment I can think of two reasons to put a "landing page" for
this in the wiki:
- Suggested improvements by users who land there can be made
immediately/cheaply/ephemerally, without either increasing the revert
burden mid-beta or making a committer feel that they have to wait to
get it "perfect" (because otherwise they flood the Postgres commit
graph with wiki-sized edits that are just going to be reverted
anyway). I think this grease phase will work best if we can be
maximally responsive to the people who take the time to talk to us.
- Informal, personal wiki voice (plus the ability to see a recent edit
date -- "yes, we're paying attention to you") seems like a better way
to encourage beta users to file bugs than formal project documentation
voice. YMMV on that.
> Both the patch split and max_protocol_version=grease sound reasonable to
> me. I'd definitely like to keep all the grease code present on the main
> branch, so we can keep using grease by default there.
>
> I think max_protocol_version=grease makes a lot of sense. Because we
> really want to make it as easy as possible for people to try out their
> implementation of the negotation (see this for example[1])
Yeah, I'd like to have that ability too. I don't know that I can
commit to writing or reviewing that amount of code for 19, though.
(And maybe there are lessons we'll learn during beta that can inform a
better production feature?)
--Jacob
