This patch adds the server infrastructure to support extensions.
There is still one significant loose end, namely how to make it play nice
with pg_upgrade, so I am not yet committing the changes that would make
all the contrib modules depend on this feature.
In passing, fix a disturbingly large amount of breakage in
AlterObjectNamespace() and callers.
Dimitri Fontaine, reviewed by Anssi Kääriäinen,
Itagaki Takahiro, Tom Lane, and numerous others
PG 8.4 added a built-in feature for casting pretty much any data type to
string types (text, varchar, etc). We allowed this to work in any of the
historically-allowed syntaxes: CAST(x AS text), x::text, text(x), or
x.text. However, multiple complaints have shown that it's too easy to
invoke such casts unintentionally in the latter two styles, particularly
field selection. To cure the problem with the narrowest possible change
of behavior, disallow use of I/O conversion casts from composite types to
string types via functional/attribute syntax. The new functionality is
still available via cast syntax.
In passing, document the equivalence of functional and attribute syntax
in a more visible place.
Block elements with verbatim formatting (literallayout, programlisting,
screen, synopsis) should be aligned at column 0 independent of the surrounding
SGML, because whitespace is significant, and indenting them creates erratic
whitespace in the output. The CSS stylesheets already take care of indenting
the output.
Assorted markup improvements to go along with it.
"val AS name" to "name := val", as per recent discussion.
This patch catches everything in the original named-parameters patch,
but I'm not certain that no other dependencies snuck in later (grepping
the source tree for all uses of AS soon proved unworkable).
In passing I note that we've dropped the ball at least once on keeping
ecpg's lexer (as opposed to parser) in sync with the backend. It would
be a good idea to go through all of pgc.l and see if it's in sync now.
I didn't attempt that at the moment.
This avoids a formatting problem in the PDF output. In the HTML output this
isn't necessary, but we've done similar things elsewhere in the documentation
so I think it's OK to do it here, too. I've refrained from breaking a longish
error message which also causes problems for the PDF output, because that would
make the HTML output look wrong.
Erik Rijkers
rather than returning NULL for some-but-not-all failures as they used to.
Remove now-redundant tests for NULL from call sites.
We had to do something about this because many call sites were failing to
check for NULL; and changing it like this seems a lot more useful and
mistake-proof than adding checks to the call sites without them.
The endterm attribute is mainly useful when the toolchain does not support
automatic link target text generation for a particular situation. In the
past, this was required by the man page tools for all reference page links,
but that is no longer the case, and it now actually gets in the way of
proper automatic link text generation. The only remaining use cases are
currently xrefs to refsects.
where to install DATA and DOCS files. This is mainly intended to allow
versioned installation, eg, install into contrib/fooM.N/ rather than
directly into contrib/.
Mark Cave-Ayland
pg_ctl gets a new mode that runs initdb. Adjust the documentation a bit to
not assume that initdb is the only way to run database cluster initialization.
But don't replace initdb as the canonical way.
Author: Zdenek Kotala <Zdenek.Kotala@Sun.COM>
to unload and re-load the library.
The difficulty with unloading a library is that we haven't defined safe
protocols for doing so. In particular, there's no safe mechanism for
getting out of a "hook" function pointer unless libraries are unloaded
in reverse order of loading. And there's no mechanism at all for undefining
a custom GUC variable, so GUC would be left with a pointer to an old value
that might or might not still be valid, and very possibly wouldn't be in
the same place anymore.
While the unload and reload behavior had some usefulness in easing
development of new loadable libraries, it's of no use whatever to normal
users, so just disabling it isn't giving up that much. Someday we might
care to expend the effort to develop safe unload protocols; but even if
we did, there'd be little certainty that every third-party loadable module
was following them, so some security restrictions would still be needed.
Back-patch to 8.2; before that, LOAD was superuser-only anyway.
Security: unprivileged users could crash backend. CVE not assigned yet
RETURNING clause, not just a SELECT as formerly.
A side effect of this patch is that when a set-returning SQL function is used
in a FROM clause, performance is improved because the output is collected into
a tuplestore within the function, rather than using the less efficient
value-per-call mechanism.
so long as all the trailing arguments are of the same (non-array) type.
The function receives them as a single array argument (which is why they
have to all be the same type).
It might be useful to extend this facility to aggregates, but this patch
doesn't do that.
This patch imposes a noticeable slowdown on function lookup --- a follow-on
patch will fix that by adding a redundant column to pg_proc.
Pavel Stehule
installations whose pg_config program does not appear first in the PATH.
Per gripe from Eddie Stanley and subsequent discussions with Fabien Coelho
and others.
were accepted by prior Postgres releases. This takes care of the loose end
left by the preceding patch to downgrade implicit casts-to-text. To avoid
breaking desirable behavior for array concatenation, introduce a new
polymorphic pseudo-type "anynonarray" --- the added concatenation operators
are actually text || anynonarray and anynonarray || text.
Get rid of VARATT_SIZE and VARATT_DATA, which were simply redundant with
VARSIZE and VARDATA, and as a consequence almost no code was using the
longer names. Rename the length fields of struct varlena and various
derived structures to catch anyplace that was accessing them directly;
and clean up various places so caught. In itself this patch doesn't
change any behavior at all, but it is necessary infrastructure if we hope
to play any games with the representation of varlena headers.
Greg Stark and Tom Lane
Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:
may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."
can - ability, "I can lift that log."
might - possibility, "It might rain today."
Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
choice. Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".
Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:
may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."
can - ability, "I can lift that log."
might - possibility, "It might rain today."
Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
choice. Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".
Also update two error messages mentioned in the documenation to match.
more, and standard_conforming_strings less, because in the future non-E
strings will not treat backslashes specially.
Also use E'' strings where backslashes are used in examples. (The
existing examples would have drawn warnings.)
Backpatch to 8.2.X.
This patch, against xfunc.sgml, adds a new subsection 33.9.12, Shared
Memory and LWLocks in C-Language Functions, describing how shared memory
and lwlocks may be requested by C add-in functions.
Marc Munro
loaded libraries: call functions _PG_init() and _PG_fini() if the library
defines such symbols. Hence we no longer need to specify an initialization
function in preload_libraries: we can assume that the library used the
_PG_init() convention, instead. This removes one source of pilot error
in use of preloaded libraries. Original patch by Ralf Engelschall,
preload_libraries changes by me.