Up to now, our distribution tarballs have included a plain-text form
of the installation.sgml chapter. The rationale for that was that a
recipient might not have either ready internet access or HTML-viewing
tools; a theory that seems downright quaint today. Maintaining the
ability to generate this file is not without cost, because it puts
special requirements on installation.sgml that are often overlooked.
Moreover, we are moving in the direction of making our distribution
tarballs be pure git snapshots for traceability/reproducibility
reasons; including generated files doesn't fit into that plan.
Hence, let's just drop INSTALL and remove the infrastructure for
generating it. The top-level README will now recommend visiting
our website to see the installation instructions. As a useful
side-effect, we can get rid of README.git which has provoked
confusion.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20231220114927.faccqqprmuyrzdip@alap3.anarazel.de
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/e07408d9-e5f2-d9fd-5672-f53354e9305e@eisentraut.org
Having different build systems producing different contents of the
NodeTag enum would be catastrophic for extension ABI stability.
But that ordering depends on the order in which gen_node_support.pl
processes its input files. It seems too fragile to let the Makefiles,
MSVC build scripts, and soon meson build scripts all set this order
independently. As a klugy but serviceable solution, put a canonical
copy of the file list into gen_node_support.pl itself, and check that
against the files given on the command line.
Also, while it's fine to add and delete node tags during development,
we must not let the assigned NodeTag values change unexpectedly in
stable branches. Add a cross-check that can be enabled when a branch
is forked off (or later, but that is a time when we're unlikely to
miss doing it). It just checks that the last auto-assigned number
doesn't change, which is simplistic but will catch the most likely
sorts of mistakes.
From time to time we do need to add a node tag in a stable branch.
To support doing that without changing the branch's auto-assigned
tag numbers, invent pg_node_attr(nodetag_number(VALUE)) which can
be used to give such a node a hand-assigned tag above the last
auto-assigned one.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/1249010.1657574337@sss.pgh.pa.us
Mention expectations for email notifications of appropriate lists
when a branch is made or retired.
(I've been doing that informally for years, but it's better to have
it written down.)
Update RELEASE_CHANGES to direct the reader towards completing the steps
outlined in the pgindent README, both as a pre-beta task and as a task
to be performed when starting a new development cycle.
This makes it less likely that somebody will miss updating the
.git-blame-ignore-revs file when running pgindent against the tree as a
routine release change task.
Author: Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie>
Reviewed-By: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAH2-Wz=2PjF4As8dWECArsXxLKganYmQ-s0UeGqHHbHhqDKqeA@mail.gmail.com
Add a .git-blame-ignore-revs file with a list of pgindent, pgperlyidy,
and reformat-dat-files commit hashes. Postgres hackers that configure
git to use the ignore file will get git-blame output that avoids
attributing line changes to the ignored indent commits. This makes
git-blame output much easier to work with in practice.
Author: Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie>
Reviewed-By: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAH2-Wz=cVh3GHTP6SdLU-Gnmt2zRdF8vZkcrFdSzXQ=WhbWm9Q@mail.gmail.com
Update checklist to reflect current practice:
* The platform-specific FAQ files are long gone.
* We've never routinely updated the libbind code we borrowed, either,
and there seems no reason to start now.
* Explain current practice of running pgindent twice per cycle.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/4038398.1620238684@sss.pgh.pa.us
We seem to have forgotten to do this in the v12 cycle, so add it as
a task in the RELEASE_CHANGES list, in hopes we won't forget again.
While here, fix findoidjoins.c so that it actually works in the
new dispensation where OID is a regular column, and change it to only
consider system relations (this avoids being fooled by the OID column
in the brintest test table).
Also tweak the largeobject test so that the somewhat-recently-added
manual creation of a LO with an OID in the system range doesn't
fool findoidjoins.c. For the moment I just made that use an unused
OID, but we might have to find a more robust solution someday.
We currently have several sets of files generated from data provided
by Unicode. These all have ad hoc rules and instructions for updating
when new Unicode versions appear, and it's not done consistently.
This patch centralizes and automates the process and makes it part of
the release checklist. The Unicode and CLDR versions are specified in
Makefile.global.in. There is a new make target "update-unicode" that
downloads all the relevant files and runs the generation script.
There is also a new script for generating the table of combining
characters for ucs_wcwidth(). That table is now in a separate include
file rather than hardcoded into the middle of other code. This is
based on the script that was used for generating
d8594d123c, but the script itself wasn't
committed at that time.
Reviewed-by: John Naylor <john.naylor@2ndquadrant.com>
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/c8d05f42-443e-6c23-819b-05b31759a37c@2ndquadrant.com
This commit adds a Perl script renumber_oids.pl, which can reassign a
range of manually-assigned OIDs to someplace else by modifying OID
fields of the catalog *.dat files and OID-assigning macros in the
catalog *.h files.
Up to now, we've encouraged new patches that need manually-assigned
OIDs to use OIDs just above the range of existing OIDs. Predictably,
this leads to patches stepping on each others' toes, as whichever
one gets committed first creates an OID conflict that other patch
author(s) have to resolve manually. With the availability of
renumber_oids.pl, we can eliminate a lot of this hassle.
The new project policy, therefore, is:
* Encourage new patches to use high OIDs (the documentation suggests
choosing a block of OIDs at random in 8000..9999).
* After feature freeze in each development cycle, run renumber_oids.pl
to move all such OIDs down to lower numbers, thus freeing the high OID
range for the next development cycle.
This plan should greatly reduce the risk of OID collisions between
concurrently-developed patches. Also, if such a collision happens
anyway, we have the option to resolve it without much effort by doing
an off-schedule OID renumbering to get the first-committed patch out
of the way. Or a patch author could use renumber_oids.pl to change
their patch's assignments without much pain.
This approach does put a premium on not hard-wiring any OID values
in places where renumber_oids.pl and genbki.pl can't fix them.
Project practice in that respect seems to be pretty good already,
but a follow-on patch will sand down some rough edges.
John Naylor and Tom Lane, per an idea of Peter Geoghegan's
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAH2-WzmMTGMcPuph4OvsO7Ykut0AOCF_i-=eaochT0dd2BN9CQ@mail.gmail.com
Historically we've had each release branch include all prior branches'
notes, including minor-release changes, back to the beginning of the
project. That's basically an O(N^2) proposition, and it was starting to
catch up with us: as of HEAD the back-branch release notes alone accounted
for nearly 30% of the documentation. While there's certainly some value
in easy access to back-branch notes, this is getting out of hand.
Hence, switch over to the rule that each branch contains only its own
release notes. So as to not make older notes too hard to find, each
branch will provide URLs for the immediately preceding branches'
release notes on the project website.
There might be value in providing aggregated notes across all branches
somewhere on the website, but that's a task for another day.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/cbd4aeb5-2d9c-8b84-e968-9e09393d4c83@postgresql.org
We're planning to put an underscore before the major version number in
branch names for v10 and later. Make sure the recipe in RELEASE_CHANGES
reflects that.
In passing, add a reminder to consider doing pgindent right before
the branch.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/E1dAkjZ-0003MG-0U@gemulon.postgresql.org
Commit b2cbced9e instituted a policy of referring to the timezone database
as the "IANA timezone database" in our user-facing documentation.
Propagate that wording into a couple of places that were still using "zic"
to refer to the database, which is definitely not right (zic is the
compilation tool, not the data).
Back-patch, not because this is very important in itself, but because
we routinely cherry-pick updates to the tznames files and I don't want
to risk future merge failures.
Up to now we've manually adjusted these numbers in several different
Makefiles at the start of each development cycle. While that's not
much work, it's easily forgotten, so let's get rid of it by setting
the SO_MINOR_VERSION values directly from $(MAJORVERSION).
In the case of libpq, this dev cycle's value of SO_MINOR_VERSION happens
to be "10" anyway, so this switch is transparent. For ecpg's shared
libraries, this will result in skipping one or two minor version numbers
between v9.6 and v10, which seems like no big problem; and it was a bit
inconsistent that they didn't have equal minor version numbers anyway.
Discussion: <21969.1471287988@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Once upon a time, it made sense for the ecpg preprocessor to have its
own version number, because it used a manually-maintained grammar that
wasn't always in sync with the core grammar. But those days are
thankfully long gone, leaving only a maintenance nuisance behind.
Let's use the PG v10 version numbering changeover as an excuse to get
rid of the ecpg version number and just have ecpg identify itself by
PG_VERSION. From the user's standpoint, ecpg will go from "4.12" in
the 9.6 branch to "10" in the 10 branch, so there's no failure of
monotonicity.
Discussion: <1471332659.4410.67.camel@postgresql.org>
Providing this information as plain text was doubtless worth the trouble
ten years ago, but it seems likely that hardly anyone reads it in this
format anymore. And the effort required to maintain these files (in the
form of extra-complex markup rules in the relevant parts of the SGML
documentation) is significant. So, let's stop doing that and rely solely
on the other documentation formats.
Per discussion, the plain-text INSTALL instructions might still be worth
their keep, so we continue to generate that file.
Rather than remove HISTORY and src/test/regress/README from distribution
tarballs entirely, replace them with simple stub files that tell the reader
where to find the relevant documentation. This is mainly to avoid possibly
breaking packaging recipes that expect these files to exist.
Back-patch to all supported branches, because simplifying the markup
requirements for release notes won't help much unless we do it in all
branches.
Tom Lane
Peter Geoghegan
Peter Eisentraut
Andrew Dunstan
Bruce Momjian
Peter Eisentraut
Alvaro Herrera
Robert Haas
Magnus Hagander