== PostgreSQL Weekly News - July 15 2007 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - July 15 2007 ==

When EnterpriseDB sales staff published a press release which raised
hackles, the community including EnterpriseDB discussed it, and
EnterpriseDB came around, promising not to issue such press releases
again. Kudos to EnterpriseDB for good community relations.

The original press release:
http://www.enterprisedb.com/news_events/press_releases/07_11_07.do

The discussion:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-advocacy/2007-07/msg00023.php

== PostgreSQL Product News ==

Version 1.1 of the Italian Full-Text Search released.
http://www.develer.com/~piro/ispell-italian/italian-fts.html

pgAdmin III 1.8.0 Beta 1 released.
http://www.pgadmin.org/

phpPgAdmin 4.1.3 security release is out. Upgrade ASAP.
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=37132

== PostgreSQL Jobs for July ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2007-07/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

PDXPUG Day at OSCON is now soliciting for speakers. Thanks to the
generosity of O'Reilly, we will have a full day of PostgreSQL sessions
the day before OSCON (Sunday, July 22nd). Change your plane tickets
now and submit at talk!
http://developer.postgresql.org/index.php/OSCON07PGDay

PgParty is at 5:30pm on July 22 following PDXPUG Day. Details at
http://www.postgresqlparty.org

== 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

Submit news and announcements by Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific time.
Please send English language ones to david(at)fetter(dot)org, German to
pwn(at)pgug(dot)de,

== Applied Patches ==

Neil Conway committed:

- In pgsql/src/bin/pg_dump/pg_dump.c, fix up the indentation of a
comment that was mangled by pgindent, and add dashes to the
start/end of the comment block to try to prevent this happening in
the future.

Magnus Hagander committed:

- Stefan Kaltenbrunner's patch to support finding gssapi functions in
the library "gss", as required by Solaris 10 and possibly others.

- In pgsql/src/bin/pg_ctl/pg_ctl.c, silence compile warning on win32,
per Stefan Kaltenbrunner and reports from the buildfarm.

- Enable GSSAPI to build using MSVC. Always build GSSAPI when
Kerberos is enabled, because the only Kerberos library supported
always contains it.

- Stefan Kaltenbrunner's patch to support GSSAPI builds where the
header is <gssapi.h> and not <gssapi/gssapi.h>, such as OpenBSD
(possibly all Heimdal).

- Fix freeing of names in Kerberos when using MIT - need to use the
free function provided in the Kerberos library. This fixes a very
hard to track down heap corruption on windows when using debug
runtimes.

- A bunch of GSSAPI fixes per comments from Tom, including using elog
instead of ereport for debugging, fixing debug levels for some
output, and properly checking for memory allocation errors in a
couple of missed places.

- Add support for GSSAPI authentication. Documentation still being
written, will be committed later. Henry B. Hotz and Magnus Hagander

Joe Conway committed:

- Restrict non-superusers to password authenticated connections to
prevent possible escalation of privilege. Provide new SECURITY
DEFINER functions with old behavior, but initially REVOKE ALL from
public for these functions. Per list discussion and design proposed
by Tom Lane.

Tom Lane committed:

- In pgsql/contrib/pgcrypto/mbuf.c, get rid of overly cute,
unportable, probably not very efficient substitute for 'bool'. Per
buildfarm warnings.

- In contrib/pageinspect and contrib/pgstattuple, fix
CHECK_RELATION_BLOCK_RANGE macro, which was not merely producing a
warning but was outright wrong.

- In pgsql/contrib/xml2, fix a passel of signed vs unsigned char
warnings.

- In pgsql/contrib/pageinspect/btreefuncs.c, silence a rather odd
compiler warning. In passing, make this file's error messages look
at least a little bit like the message style guidelines say.

- In pgsql/contrib/tsearch2/dict_thesaurus.c, avoid
possibly-unportable initializer, per buildfarm warning.

- In contrib/oid2name and contrib/pg_standby, change a couple of
exit(0) to return 0 to suppress complaints from not-too-bright
compilers. Per buildfarm results.

- In pgsql/contrib/pgcrypto/imath.c, silence Solaris compiler warning,
per buildfarm.

- Fix compile warning on Solaris, per buildfarm. (Why have we got
three slightly different copies of this file?)

- In pgsql/contrib/pgbench/pgbench.c, fix possible portability
problem, per buildfarm warnings.

- In pgsql/contrib/tsearch2/stopword.c, fix unportable use of
isspace(), per buildfarm results.

- Because plpgsql's scanner uses %option case-insensitive, flex's
results could theoretically vary depending on what the compile-time
locale setting is. Hence, force it to see LC_CTYPE=C to ensure
consistent build results. (It's likely that this makes no
difference in practice, since our specification for "identifier"
surely includes both ends of any possible uppercase/lowercase pair
anyway. But it should silence warnings about ambiguous character
classes that are reported by some buildfarm members.)

- Reject zero or negative BY step in plpgsql integer FOR-loops, and
behave sanely if the loop value overflows int32 on the way to the
end value. Avoid useless computation of "SELECT 1" when BY is
omitted. Avoid some type-punning between Datum and int4 that dates
from the original coding.

- Note incompatibility with Oracle's version of FOR ... REVERSE, per
Andrew Dunstan. Minor other improvements in documentation of
integer FOR loops.

- Editorial overhaul of plpgsql documentation. Provide detailed
documentation of variable substitution and plan caching behavior in
dedicated sections. (A lot of this material existed already, but
was scattered in various places in the chapter.) Reorganize
material a little bit, mostly to try to avoid diving into deep
details in the first introductory sections. Document some fine
points that had escaped treatment before, notably the ability to
qualify plpgsql variable names with block labels. Some minor
wordsmithing here and there.

- Volatile-qualify a dozen variables in plpython.c to eliminate
warnings from old versions of gcc. It's not clear to me that this
is really necessary for correctness, but less warnings are always
good. Per buildfarm results and local testing.

- Fix map_sql_typecoll_to_xmlschema_types() to not fail on dropped
columns, per my gripe earlier today. Make it look a bit less like
someone's first effort at backend coding.

- Add casts to suppress warnings about m68k-specific kluge in fmgr.c.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/cash.c, fix a portability bug (ye
olde not casting a <ctype.h> argument to unsigned char).
Fortunately we still have buildfarm machines that will flag this.
Seems to be new in CVS HEAD, so no backpatch.

- Get dirmod.c on the same page as port.h about whether we use
pgsymlink on Cygwin (answer: we don't). Also try to unwind the
#ifdef spaghetti a little bit. Untested but hopefully I didn't
break anything.

- In pgsql/contrib/pg_trgm/trgm_op.c, simplify overly-cute array
coding to avoid an apparent gcc bug, which may or may not be
harmless. Report from Stefan Kaltenbrunner, patch from Heikki
Linnakangas.

- In pgsql/src/bin/pg_resetxlog/pg_resetxlog.c, suppress Sun Studio
warnings, per Stefan Kaltenbrunner.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/mb/wchar.c, suppress an integer-overflow
warning.

- Some of our port-specific dynloader implementations are careful to
define pg_dlsym() as returning a PGFunction pointer, not just any
pointer-to-function. But many are not. Suppress compiler warnings
on platforms that aren't careful by inserting explicit casts at the
two call sites that didn't have a cast already. Per Stefan
Kaltenbrunner.

- In pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/xml.c, compute max and min int8
values using unsigned arithmetic, in hopes of suppressing Sun Studio
compiler warnings. Per Stefan Kaltenbrunner.

- Fix some warnings (probably actual bugs) generated by new GSSAPI
code when built on a 64-bit machine. Per buildfarm results
extracted by Stefan Kaltenbrunner.

- In pgsql/src/backend/optimizer/prep/prepunion.c, fix mistaken Assert
in adjust_appendrel_attr_needed, per Greg Stark.

- Suppress a warning that some versions of gcc emit about %x in
strftime. Per suggestion from Alvaro Herrera.

- Add note that building from CVS requires bison and flex, whereas
building from a distribution tarball does not.

- Fix misspellings in pgsql/src/include/pg_config.h.in and
configure.in.

- Adjust processSQLNamePattern() so that $ within the pattern is
always matched literally, whether quoted or not. Since we allow $
as a character within identifiers, this behavior is useful, whereas
the previous behavior of treating it as the regexp ending anchor was
nearly useless given that the pattern is automatically anchored
anyway. This affects the arguments of psql's \d commands as well as
pg_dump's -n and -t switches. Per discussion.

- Fix stddev_pop(numeric) and var_pop(numeric), which were incorrectly
producing the same outputs as stddev_samp() and var_samp()
respectively.

- Fix single-user mode so that interrupts (particularly SIGTERM and
SIGQUIT) will be recognized and processed while waiting for input,
rather than only after something has been typed. Also make SIGQUIT
do the same thing as SIGTERM in single-user mode, ie, do a normal
shutdown and exit. Since it's relatively easy to provoke SIGQUIT
from the keyboard, people may try that instead of control-D, and
we'd rather this leads to orderly shutdown. Per report from Leon
Mergen and subsequent discussion.

- Minor copy-editing on pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ref/postgres-ref.sgml.

- Remove the pgstat_drop_relation() call from smgr_internal_unlink(),
because we don't know at that point which relation OID to tell
pgstat to forget. The code was passing the relfilenode, which is
incorrect, and could possibly cause some other relation's stats to
be zeroed out. While we could try to clean this up, it seems much
simpler and more reliable to let the next invocation of
pgstat_vacuum_tabstat() fix things; which indeed is how it worked
before I introduced the buggy code into 8.1.3 and later :-(.
Problem noticed by Itagaki Takahiro, fix is per subsequent
discussion.

== Pending Patches ==

Neil Conway sent in an updated patch which implements CREATE TABLE
LIKE INCLUDING INDEXES support.

Stefan Kaltenbrunner sent in a patch to add GSSAPI support for
OpenBSD.

Alvaro Herrera sent in a patch which fixes "missing sentinel" warnings
in pg_regress.c.

Pavan Deolasee sent in two more revisions of his HOT patch.

Simon Riggs sent in a patch to fix pg_standby.c to allow for spaces in
path names.

Simon Riggs sent in two versions of a patch documenting Synchronous
Commit.

Affan Salman sent in a patch which fixes a bug in deferred referential
integrity triggers for non-key UPDATEs and subtransactions.

Gavin Roy sent in a patch to allow pg_dump(all) to ignore tablespaces.