Historically we've been lax about this, but seeing that we're not
lax in C files, there doesn't seem to be a good reason to be so
in the documentation. Remove the existing occurrences (mostly
though not entirely in copied-n-pasted psql output), and modify
.gitattributes so that "git diff --check" will warn about future
cases.
While at it, add *.pm to the set of extensions .gitattributes
knows about, and remove some obsolete entries for files that
we don't have in the tree anymore.
Per followup discussion of commit 5a892c9b1.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/E1nfcV1-000kOR-E5@gemulon.postgresql.org
Sometimes it happens that the visibility information for a tuple
becomes corrupted, either due to bugs in the database software or
external factors. Provide a function heap_force_kill() that can
be used to truncate such dead tuples to dead line pointers, and
a function heap_force_freeze() that can be used to overwrite the
visibility information in such a way that the tuple becomes
all-visible.
These functions are unsafe, in that you can easily use them to
corrupt a database that was not previously corrupted, and you can
use them to further corrupt an already-corrupted database or to
destroy data. The documentation accordingly cautions against
casual use. However, in some cases they permit recovery of data
that would otherwise be very difficult to recover, or to allow a
system to continue to function when it would otherwise be difficult
to do so.
Because we may want to add other functions for performing other
kinds of surgery in the future, the new contrib module is called
pg_surgery rather than something specific to these functions. I
proposed back-patching this so that it could be more easily used
by people running existing releases who are facing these kinds of
problems, but that proposal did not attract enough support, so
no back-patch for now.
Ashutosh Sharma, reviewed and tested by Andrey M. Borodin,
M. Beena Emerson, Masahiko Sawada, Rajkumar Raghuwanshi,
Asim Praveen, and Mark Dilger, and somewhat revised by me.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmoZW1fsU-QUNCRUQMGUygBDPVeOTLCqRdQZch=EYZnctSA@mail.gmail.com
Tom Lane
Robert Haas