[nflug] == PostgreSQL Weekly News - December 03 2006 ==

[Wolfe, Robert]

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - December 03 2006 ==

PostgreSQL 8.2.0 will be out on Tuesday, December 5th.
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.2/static/release-8-2.html

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

pgFouine is now in Fedora Core 5,6 and 7 Extras
http://people.planetpostgresql.org/devrim/index.php?/archives/69-Pushed-pgfouine-into-Fedora-Core-Extras.html

pgAdmin III v1.6.1 released.
http://www.pgadmin.org/download/

== PostgreSQL Local ==

Everything this week was global.

== PostgreSQL in the News ==

Planet PostgreSQL: http://www.planetpostgresql.org/

General Bits, Archives and occasional new articles:
http://www.varlena.com/GeneralBits/

PostgreSQL Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter and
Dave Page.

== Applied Patches ==

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- Wording refinement for external references in man pages.

- Don't ship spi_* man pages.  (We don't do that anyway, but now it's
  automatic.)

- Translation updates.

- Make Options for Windows a second-level heading instead of
  first-level.

- Fix typos.

- Spelling fix in pgsql/src/backend/utils/misc/guc.c

- Fix some translator comments so that xgettext finds them and
  pgindent does not destroy them.  Maybe we can adjust pgindent
  sometime.

- Per Dennis Bjorklund, Add workaround for localizing May and
  abbreviated May differently.

- Fix gratuitous message spelling differences

Andrew Dunstan committed:

- Protect vfprintf from hijacking by Windows gettext just like other
  members of the *printf family.

Tom Lane committed:

- Refactor ExecGetJunkAttribute to avoid searching for junk attributes
  by name on each and every row processed.  Profiling suggests this
  may buy a percent or two for simple UPDATE scenarios, which isn't
  huge, but when it's so easy to get...

- Fix LIMIT/OFFSET for null limit values.  This worked before 8.2 but
  was broken by the change to make limit values int8 instead of int4.
  (Specifically, you can do DatumGetInt32 safely on a null value, but
  not DatumGetInt64.)  Per bug #2803 from Greg Johnson.

- Stamp HEAD as 8.3devel.

- Put release date in release notes.

- Simon Riggs's patch which adds some documentation for DTrace
  support.

- Editorial improvements for GIN documentation.

- Some more supported-platforms updates: buildfarm hare is alive
  again, and penguin reported in recently enough to justify the
  assumption that we haven't broken ARM support in 8.2.

- Document the recently-understood hazard that a rollback can release
  row-level locks that logically should not be released, because when
  a subtransaction overwrites XMAX all knowledge of the previous lock
  state is lost.  It seems unlikely that we will be able to fix this
  before 8.3...

- Make the bgwriter's error recovery path do smgrcloseall().  On
  Windows this should allow delete-pending files to actually go away,
  and thereby work around the various complaints we've seen about
  'permission denied' errors in such cases.  Should be reasonably
  harmless in any case...

- Editorial improvements to backup and warm-standby documentation.

- Minor wording improvements to
  pgsql/doc/src/sgml/high-availability.sgml.

- Adjust the description of locking to clarify that locks held by a
  subtransaction are released if the subtransaction aborts --- in
  user-level terminology, this means either rolling back to a
  savepoint or escaping from a plpgsql exception block.  Per recent
  suggestion from Simon Riggs.

- Better solution to the tr problem: use sed instead.  Per Martijn and
  Andrew.

- Update supported-platforms list based on recent buildfarm results.

- Minor adjustments to make failures in startup/shutdown behave more
  cleanly.  StartupXLOG and ShutdownXLOG no longer need to be critical
  sections, because in all contexts where they are invoked,
  elog(ERROR) would be translated to elog(FATAL) anyway.  (One change
  in bgwriter.c is needed to make this true: set ExitOnAnyError before
  trying to exit.  This is a good fix anyway since the existing code
  would have gone into an infinite loop on elog(ERROR) during
  shutdown.)  That avoids a misleading report of PANIC during
  semi-orderly failures.  Modify the postmaster to include the startup
  process in the set of processes that get SIGTERM when a fast
  shutdown is requested, and also fix it to not try to restart the
  bgwriter if the bgwriter fails while trying to write the shutdown
  checkpoint.  Net result is that "pg_ctl stop -m fast" does something
  reasonable for a system in warm standby mode, and so should Unix
  system shutdown (ie, universal SIGTERM).  Per gripe from Stephen
  Harris and some corner-case testing of my own.

- Ignore libedit/libreadline while probing for strlcpy and some other
  standard functions.  Per report from Stefan Kaltenbrunner.

- More MSVC build support from Magnus Hagander.

- In the pg_dump docs, add an example showing how to cope with
  mixed-case names in pg_dump switches.

- Update timezone data to tzdata2006p zic distribution.  It seems
  Western Australia decided to institute DST with one month's notice
  ... way to go, politicians.

- Mark to_number() and the numeric-type variants of to_char() as
  stable, not immutable, because their results depend on lc_numeric;
  this is a longstanding oversight.  We cannot force initdb for this
  in the back branches, but we can at least provide correct catalog
  entries for future installations.

- Mark to_char(timestamp without timezone) as stable, not immutable,
  since its result now depends on the lc_messages setting, as noted by
  Bruce.  Also, mark to_number() and the numeric-type variants of
  to_char() as stable, because their results depend on lc_numeric;
  this is a longstanding oversight.  Also, mark to_date() and
  to_char(interval) as stable; although these appear not to depend on
  any GUC variables as of CVS HEAD, that seems a property unlikely to
  survive future improvements.  It seems best to mark all the
  formatting functions stable and be done with it.  catversion not
  bumped, because this does not seem critical enough to force a
  post-RC1 initdb, and anyway we cannot do so in the back branches.

- Back-patch HEAD's fixes to recognize __ppc64__ as equivalent to
  __powerpc64__.  Per confirmation from Brian Wipf that this is
  correct and necessary for Darwin 64-bit.

- Fix inheritance description to note that not-null constraints are
  inherited, per Taiki Yamaguchi.

- Add $(CFLAGS) to the simplified build rule for .so libraries on
  Darwin.  Arguably we should do this on *all* platforms, but for the
  moment I'll be conservative and just do it where it's demonstrably
  needed.  Per report from Brian Wipf.

Michael Meskes committed:

- Install ecpg_config.h

Alvaro Herrera committed:

- In pgsql/src/interfaces/ecpg/include/Makefile, fix problem which
  prevented installation on VPATH builds.

Teodor Sigaev committed:

- Fix bug with page deletion.  If an inner page is removed and it
  tries to remove page on next level linked from next inner page,
  ginScanToDelete() wrongly sets parent page.  The bug manifests when
  many item pointers  (several hundreds of thousands) were deleted
  from index.  This bug was discovered by hubert Depesz Lubaczewski.
  It looks like we need an RC2 before release...

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Update most recent version from 8.2 to 8.2.0.

- Stamp 8.2, except configure.in.

- Update for release 8.2.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

- Improve portability of 'tr' invocation in PGAC_ARG_CHECK.  Reported
  by Olivier Prenant, fixed by Peter Eisentraut.



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-- 
Robert Wolfe, Linux and Network Admin
net261.com | http://www.net261.com:85
robert at net261.com

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