== PostgreSQL Weekly News - December 21 2014 ==

== PostgreSQL Weekly News - December 21 2014 ==

PostgreSQL 9.4 released!
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/release-9-4.html

The Moscow PostgreSQL Meetup Group will celebrate the PostgreSQL 9.4
release on Tueesday, December 23, 2014 at the Parallels office.
Details and RSVP:
http://PostgreSQLRussia.org

The Bulgaria PostgreSQL User Group has started.
http://bgpug.org/

== PostgreSQL Jobs for December ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2014-12/threads.php

== PostgreSQL Local ==

FOSDEM PGDay (January 30, 2015) and the FOSDEM PostgreSQL
Dev Room (January 31-February 1, 2015)
http://fosdem2015.pgconf.eu/

Prague PostgreSQL Developer Day (P2D2) 2015 will be in Prague, Czech
Republic February 11-12, 2015.
http://www.p2d2.cz/

The Melbourne PostgreSQL meetup on February 18, 2015 will be hosting
Gabriele Bartolini on PostgreSQL 9.4 for devops. Details below, and
R, SVP.
http://www.meetup.com/melpug/events/219082475/

pgDaySF 2015 will be held March 10, 2015 in Burlingame, California.
http://sfpostgres.org/pgday-sf-2015-call-for-speakers-and-sponsors/

The CfP is open for Nordic PostgreSQL Day 2015, which will be held
March 11, 2015 in Copenhagen, Denmark.
http://2015.nordicpgday.org/cfp/

The CfP for PGConf US 2015 is open through December 17th, 2014
Notifications will go out on January 10, 2014. The event takes place
March 25-27, 2015 in NYC.
http://nyc.pgconf.us/2015/

== PostgreSQL in the News ==

Planet PostgreSQL: http://planet.postgresql.org/

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 language
to pwn(at)pgug(dot)de, Italian language to pwn(at)itpug(dot)org(dot) Spanish language
to pwn(at)arpug(dot)com(dot)ar(dot)

== Applied Patches ==

Tom Lane pushed:

- Improve documentation around parameter-setting and ALTER SYSTEM.
The ALTER SYSTEM ref page hadn't been held to a very high standard,
nor was the feature well integrated into section 18.1 (parameter
setting). Also, though commit 4c4654afe had improved the structure
of 18.1, it also introduced a lot of poor wording, imprecision, and
outright falsehoods. Try to clean that up.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/af06aa822dbc023f3a103278ec381e1c88d67db1

- Fix point <-> polygon code for zero-distance case.
"PG_RETURN_FLOAT8(x)" is not "return x", except perhaps by accident
on some platforms.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/9418820efb32e739706cc3860347089315562ee4

- Fix file descriptor leak after failure of a \setshell command in
pgbench. If the called command fails to return data,
runShellCommand forgot to pclose() the pipe before returning. This
is fairly harmless in the current code, because pgbench would then
abandon further processing of that client thread; so no more than
nclients descriptors could be leaked this way. But it's not hard to
imagine future improvements whereby that wouldn't be true. In any
case, it's sloppy coding, so patch all branches. Found by Coverity.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/d38e8d30cecea96a088330133e232c465a222d0a

- Suppress bogus statistics when pgbench failed to complete any
transactions. Code added in 9.4 would attempt to divide by zero in
such cases. Noted while testing fix for missing-pclose problem.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/de8e46f5f5785f4016aabf2aa231faa89a0746fb

- Fix off-by-one loop count in MapArrayTypeName, and get rid of static
array. MapArrayTypeName would copy up to NAMEDATALEN-1 bytes of the
base type name, which of course is wrong: after prepending '_' there
is only room for NAMEDATALEN-2 bytes. Aside from being the wrong
result, this case would lead to overrunning the statically allocated
work buffer. This would be a security bug if the function were ever
used outside bootstrap mode, but it isn't, at least not in any
currently supported branches. Aside from fixing the off-by-one loop
logic, this patch gets rid of the static work buffer by having
MapArrayTypeName pstrdup its result; the sole caller was already
doing that, so this just requires moving the pstrdup call. This
saves a few bytes but mainly it makes the API a lot cleaner.
Back-patch on the off chance that there is some third-party code
using MapArrayTypeName with less-secure input. Pushing pstrdup into
the function should not cause any serious problems for such
hypothetical code; at worst there might be a short term memory leak.
Per Coverity scanning.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/66709133c7e5506be19bf56a82f45dd150f74732

- Fix poorly worded error message. Adam Brightwell, per report from
Martín Marqués.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c977b8cffc76be00fbaab76e3271e05104260ec7

- Fix another poorly worded error message. Spotted by Álvaro Herrera.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c340494235111fb87e46b11ca6a87a7a43795f0f

- Allow CHECK constraints to be placed on foreign tables. As with NOT
NULL constraints, we consider that such constraints are merely
reports of constraints that are being enforced by the remote server
(or other underlying storage mechanism). Their only real use is to
allow planner optimizations, for example in constraint-exclusion
checks. Thus, the code changes here amount to little more than
removal of the error that was formerly thrown for applying CHECK to
a foreign table. (In passing, do a bit of cleanup of the ALTER
FOREIGN TABLE reference page, which had accumulated some weird
decisions about ordering etc.) Shigeru Hanada and Etsuro Fujita,
reviewed by Kyotaro Horiguchi and Ashutosh Bapat.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/fc2ac1fb41c2defb8caf825781af75db158fb7a9

- Improve hash_create's API for selecting simple-binary-key hash
functions. Previously, if you wanted anything besides C-string hash
keys, you had to specify a custom hashing function to hash_create().
Nearly all such callers were specifying tag_hash or oid_hash; which
is tedious, and rather error-prone, since a caller could easily miss
the opportunity to optimize by using hash_uint32 when appropriate.
Replace this with a design whereby callers using simple binary-data
keys just specify HASH_BLOBS and don't need to mess with specific
support functions. hash_create() itself will take care of
optimizing when the key size is four bytes. This nets out saving a
few hundred bytes of code space, and offers a measurable performance
improvement in tidbitmap.c (which was not exploiting the opportunity
to use hash_uint32 for its 4-byte keys). There might be some wins
elsewhere too, I didn't analyze closely. In future we could look
into offering a similar optimized hashing function for 8-byte keys.
Under this design that could be done in a centralized and
machine-independent fashion, whereas getting it right for keys of
platform-dependent sizes would've been notationally painful before.
For the moment, the old way still works fine, so as not to break
source code compatibility for loadable modules. Eventually we might
want to remove tag_hash and friends from the exported API
altogether, since there's no real need for them to be explicitly
referenced from outside dynahash.c. Teodor Sigaev and Tom Lane
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/4a14f13a0abfbf7e7d44a3d2689444d1806aa9dc

- Improve documentation about CASE and constant subexpressions. The
possibility that constant subexpressions of a CASE might be
evaluated at planning time was touched on in 9.17.1 (CASE
expressions), but it really ought to be explained in 4.2.14
(Expression Evaluation Rules) which is the primary discussion of
such topics. Add text and an example there, and revise the <note>
under CASE to link there. Back-patch to all supported branches,
since it's acted like this for a long time (though 9.2+ is probably
worse because of its more aggressive use of constant-folding via
replanning of nominally-prepared statements). Pre-9.4, also
back-patch text added in commit 0ce627d4 about CASE versus aggregate
functions. Tom Lane and David Johnston, per discussion of bug
#12273.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5b516835897f2a487eedacdb605ac40d52f6b484

- Docs: clarify treatment of variadic functions with zero variadic
arguments. Explain that you have to use "VARIADIC ARRAY[]" to pass
an empty array to a variadic parameter position. This was already
implicit in the text but it seems better to spell it out. Per a
suggestion from David Johnston, though I didn't use his proposed
wording. Back-patch to all supported branches.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/699300a146c04e207a8fdec407538cdf5368fde5

Peter Eisentraut pushed:

- doc: Add link to how to specify time zone names to initdb man page
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/6457ff93feca5b798def2c41786904fe13cc41d1

- Translation updates
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/ee3bec5e22f7aed4d9086bec45a8d1821a9e236c

- Translation updates
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/733a264ddc1ad29d9cb91cbd712c1ef5f92886c8

Heikki Linnakangas pushed:

- Add point <-> polygon distance operator. Alexander Korotkov,
reviewed by Emre Hasegeli.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/4520ba67691fc13bb8be2cc47dd0bf8c7ab94205

- Fix incorrect comment about XLogRecordBlockHeader.data_length field.
It does not include the possible full-page image. While at it,
reformat the comment slightly to make it more readable. Reported by
Rahila Syed
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/da9f6a78ef84898ccdf7855089aa08e7524dfbdc

- Misc comment typo fixes. Backpatch the applicable parts, just to
make backpatching future patches easier.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/4d65e16a6ff609701a8780d3cddbae02c6e20926

- Clarify the regexp used to detect source files in MSVC builds. The
old pattern would match files with strange extensions like *.ry or
*.lpp. Refactor it to only include files with known extensions, and
to make it more readable. Per Andrew Dunstan's suggestion.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/ce01548d4fdbc06dce59f90a3e4598162b1e8ea1

- Change how first WAL segment on new timeline after promotion is
created. Two changes: 1. When copying a WAL segment from old
timeline to create the first segment on the new timeline, only copy
up to the point where the timeline switch happens, and zero-fill the
rest. This avoids corner cases where we might think that the copied
WAL from the previous timeline belong to the new timeline. 2. If
the timeline switch happens at a segment boundary, don't copy the
whole old segment to the new timeline. It's pointless, because it's
100% identical to the old segment.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/ba94518aad23beb800b657bd0cc8c4e7ea43ca33

- Fix timestamp in end-of-recovery WAL records. We used time(null) to
set a TimestampTz field, which gave bogus results. Noticed while
looking at pg_xlogdump output. Backpatch to 9.3 and above, where
the fast promotion was introduced.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5c805d0a813e6c611485bfc9bde9d2a10d1800e5

- Fix file descriptor leak at end of recovery. XLogFileInit() returns
a file descriptor, which needs to be closed. The leak was
short-lived, since the startup process exits shortly afterwards, but
it was clearly a bug, nevertheless. Per Coverity report.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/2ef6c66a2b1ed288a5e4448989d4b85082d22736

Álvaro Herrera pushed:

- add missing newline
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/4576b9cc46b7a0966b94927b4dcc7d24823cab6a

- Have VACUUM log number of skipped pages due to pins. Author: Jim
Nasby, some kibitzing by Heikki Linnankangas. Discussion leading to
current behavior and precise wording fueled by thoughts from Robert
Haas and Andres Freund.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/35192f0626ccc1729eb6220a5fa04699fd62e04e

- Use %u to print out BlockNumber variables. Per Tom Lane
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/cd6e66572b7b5f6bae2b8c8bd62e4862b0a2cf9d

- pg_event_trigger_dropped_objects: add behavior flags. Add "normal"
and "original" flags as output columns to the
pg_event_trigger_dropped_objects() function. With this it's
possible to distinguish which objects, among those listed, need to
be explicitely referenced when trying to replicate a deletion. This
is necessary so that the list of objects can be pruned to the
minimum necessary to replicate the DROP command in a remote server
that might have slightly different schema (for instance, TOAST
tables and constraints with different names and such.) Catalog
version bumped due to change of function definition. Reviewed by:
Abhijit Menon-Sen, Stephen Frost, Heikki Linnakangas, Robert Haas.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0ee98d1cbf1cd3b888633b2ee90e0001889c12b9

Noah Misch pushed:

- Fix commit_ts test suite for systems with coarse timestamp
granularity. Noticed on a couple of Windows configurations. Petr
Jelinek, reviewed by Michael Paquier.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0916eba131530b296f86137759a32f66ffedff7b

- Fix previous commit for TAP test suites in VPATH builds. Per
buildfarm member crake. Back-patch to 9.4, where the TAP suites
were introduced.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/40c598fa15bef1ea10850aad80914ab797808106

- Recognize Makefile line continuations in fetchRegressOpts().
Back-patch to 9.0 (all supported versions). This is mere
future-proofing in the context of the master branch, but commit
f6dc6dd5ba54d52c0733aaafc50da2fbaeabb8b0 requires it of older
branches.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/43b56171b1fbcba8a6309de755545e3c63ac25dd

- Lock down regression testing temporary clusters on Windows. Use
SSPI authentication to allow connections exclusively from the OS
user that launched the test suite. This closes on Windows the
vulnerability that commit be76a6d39e2832d4b88c0e1cc381aa44a7f86881
closed on other platforms. Users of "make installcheck" or custom
test harnesses can run "pg_regress --config-auth=DATADIR" to
activate the same authentication configuration that "make check"
would use. Back-patch to 9.0 (all supported versions). Security:
CVE-2014-0067
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/f6dc6dd5ba54d52c0733aaafc50da2fbaeabb8b0

Andrew Dunstan pushed:

- Fix some jsonb issues found by Coverity in recent commits. Mostly
these issues concern the non-use of function results. These have
been changed to use (void) pushJsonbValue(...) instead of assigning
the result to a variable that gets overwritten before it is used.
There is a larger issue that we should possibly examine the API for
pushJsonbValue(), so that instead of returning a value it modifies a
state argument. The current idiom is rather clumsy. However,
changing that requires quite a bit more work, so this change should
do for the moment.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c8315930e6a34b616d9840985c85eb0d856dd2df

Magnus Hagander pushed:

- Remove redundant sentence. Spotted by David Johnston
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/cb7b5c5c6f8df5fee936c6a26553427166cbdbfe

- Add missing documentation for some vcregress modes. Michael Paquier
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/6964ad95d78a21e6d7aec9727ea9a0af68482c35

- Update .gitignore for pg_upgrade. Add Windows versions of generated
scripts, and make sure we only ignore the scripts int he root
directory. Michael Paquier
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/cef0ae498ccbd4b166ee4fe6cb33612646fdc4b5

Andres Freund pushed:

- Fix (re-)starting from a basebackup taken off a standby after a
failure. When starting up from a basebackup taken off a standby
extra logic has to be applied to compute the point where the data
directory is consistent. Normal base backups use a WAL record for
that purpose, but that isn't possible on a standby. That logic had
a error check ensuring that the cluster's control file indicates
being in recovery. Unfortunately that check was too strict,
disregarding the fact that the control file could also indicate that
the cluster was shut down while in recovery. That's possible when
the a cluster starting from a basebackup is shut down before the
backup label has been removed. When everything goes well that's a
short window, but when either restore_command or primary_conninfo
isn't configured correctly the window can get much wider. That's
because inbetween reading and unlinking the label we restore the
last checkpoint from WAL which can need additional WAL. To fix
simply also allow starting when the control file indicates "shutdown
in recovery". There's nicer fixes imaginable, but they'd be more
invasive. Backpatch to 9.2 where support for taking basebackups
from standbys was added.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c303e9e7e5d4ddf04526ed8e821ef4b1c3bc2d12

- Adjust valgrind suppression to the changes in 2c03216d8311. CRC
computation is now done in XLogRecordAssemble.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/72950dc1d02c6b44c6475485fd5ef8ac277bbdd0

- Define Assert() et al to ((void)0) to avoid pedantic warnings.
gcc's -Wempty-body warns about the current usage when compiling
postgres without --enable-cassert.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/9959abb0122ca2b0e4817e20954e3083c90becdc

- Prevent potentially hazardous compiler/cpu reordering during lwlock
release. In LWLockRelease() (and in 9.4+ LWLockUpdateVar()) we
release enqueued waiters using PGSemaphoreUnlock(). As there are
other sources of such unlocks backends only wake up if
MyProc->lwWaiting is set to false; which is only done in the
aforementioned functions. Before this commit there were dangers
because the store to lwWaitLink could become visible before the
store to lwWaitLink. This could both happen due to compiler
reordering (on most compilers) and on some platforms due to the CPU
reordering stores. The possible consequence of this is that a
backend stops waiting before lwWaitLink is set to NULL. If that
backend then tries to acquire another lock and has to wait there the
list could become corrupted once the lwWaitLink store is finally
performed. Add a write memory barrier to prevent that issue.
Unfortunately the barrier support has been only added in 9.2. Given
that the issue has not knowingly been observed in praxis it seems
sufficient to prohibit compiler reordering using volatile for 9.0
and 9.1. Actual problems due to compiler reordering are more likely
anyway. Discussion: 20140210134625(dot)GA15246(at)awork2(dot)anarazel(dot)de
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/37de8de9e33606a043e98fee64b5595aedaa8254

Fujii Masao pushed:

- Remove odd blank line in comment. Etsuro Fujita
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/26674c923d0ecbac2cda039433163d17584fae65

- Update .gitignore for config.cache. Also add a comment about why
regreesion.* aren't listed in .gitignore. Jim Nasby
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/ccf292cd2ec16c69ddfee3bf72afe113a7595e00

- Ensure variables live across calls in generate_series(numeric,
numeric). In generate_series_step_numeric(), the variables
"start_num" and "stop_num" may be potentially freed until the next
call. So they should be put in the location which can survive
across calls. But previously they were not, and which could cause
incorrect behavior of generate_series(numeric, numeric). This commit
fixes this problem by copying them on multi_call_memory_ctx. Andrew
Gierth
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/19e065c0492c34fbccbd2c3707ba68cff14195a3

- Add memory barriers for PgBackendStatus.st_changecount protocol.
st_changecount protocol needs the memory barriers to ensure that the
apparent order of execution is as it desires. Otherwise, for
example, the CPU might rearrange the code so that st_changecount is
incremented twice before the modification on a machine with weak
memory ordering. This surprising result can lead to bugs. This
commit introduces the macros to load and store st_changecount with
the memory barriers. These are called before and after
PgBackendStatus entries are modified or copied into private memory,
in order to prevent CPU from reordering PgBackendStatus access. Per
discussion on pgsql-hackers, we decided not to back-patch this to
9.4 or before until we get an actual bug report about this. Patch
by me. Review by Robert Haas.
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/38628db8d8caff21eb6cf8d775c0b2d04cf07b9b

Bruce Momjian pushed:

- doc: Adjust wording of ALTER TABLESPACE restriction. Report by
Noah Misch
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/cfb64fde7bb93fb44ebcb1f1924faec5b5705af7

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Peter Eisentraut sent in another revision of a patch to implement
TRANSFORMs.

Kaigai Kouhei sent in a patch to add ctidscan as an example of the
custom scan interface.

Amit Langote sent in a patch to fix a comment typo in typedef struct
BrinTuple.

Marko (johto) Tiikkaja sent in a patch to add a DROP PRIVILEGES OWNED
BY functionality.

Peter Eisentraut and Michael Paquier traded patches to move the
executables from contrib/ to bin/

Petr (PJMODOS) Jelinek sent in a patch to add a few helper functions
for making logical replication easier.

Petr (PJMODOS) Jelinek sent in another revision of a patch to add a
sequence access method.

Alexander Shulgin sent in another revision of a patch to add an
ssl_protocols configuration option.

Shigeru HANADA sent in a patch to add push-down JOIN support for
foreign tables.

Simon Riggs sent in two revisions of a patch to ensure that logical
decoding follows timelines.

Michael Paquier sent in a patch to document some modes of vcregress.pl
that had not previously been documented.

Michael Paquier sent in a patch to ensure that analyze_new_cluster.bat
and delete_old_cluster.bat not be ignored with vcregress upgradecheck.

Kyotaro HORIGUCHI sent in another revision of a patch to enable
asynchronous execution in postgres_fdw.

Simon Riggs sent in a patch to start WALWriter during recovery and
make it responsible for fsyncing data, allowing WALReceiver to
progress other useful actions.

Christoph Berg sent in a patch to fix an unlikely integer overflow.

Dilip Kumar sent in another revision of a patch to allow parallel
cores to be used by vacuumdb.

Amit Kapila sent in two more revisions of a patch to fix a mismatch
between pg_basebackup and Windows.

Alexander Shulgin sent in a patch to allow a different HINT to be sent
to the server error log and to the client, which will be useful where
there's security sensitive information that's more appropriate for a
HINT than a DETAIL message. Alongside this, he sent a patch to log a
hint if pg_ident.conf or pg_hba.conf changed since last reload.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in four more revisions of a patch to implement
a GiST kNN search queue.

Peter Geoghegan sent in another revision of a patch to implement
INSERT ... ON CONFLICT {UPDATE | IGNORE}, and a patch on top of same
to fix a bug.

Adam Brightwell and Álvaro Herrera traded patches to implement a role
attribute bitmask catalog representation.

Tomas Vondra and Ali Akbar traded patches to decrease memory
needlessly consumed by array_agg.

Teodor Sigaev sent in another revision of a patch to add a compress
method for SP-GiST.

Marius Timmer sent in another revision of a patch to display sort
order options in VERBOSE mode of EXPLAIN.

Alexander Shulgin sent in two more revisions of a patch to track
TRUNCATE via pgstat.

Teodor Sigaev and David Rowley traded patches to speed up tidmap by
caching pages.

Michael Paquier sent in four more revisions of a patch to compress
full-page writes.

Teodor Sigaev sent in two more revisions of a patch to speed up tidmap
by hashing BlockNumber.

Simon Riggs sent in another revision of a patch to turn off
HOT/Cleanup sometimes.

Simon Riggs and David Rowley traded patches intended to make it
possible to treat aggregates more flexibly, including strategies for
parallelizing.

Tom Lane sent in a patch to make dynahash select normal hash
functions.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in a patch to turn many of the btree_gin
macros into real functions.

Mark Dilger sent in another revision of a patch to allow Oid
formatting in printf/elog strings.

Petr (PJMODOS) Jelinek sent in another revision of a patch to
implement TABLESAMPLE.

Amit Kapila sent in another revision of a patch to implement parallel
sequential scan.

Petr (PJMODOS) Jelinek sent in another revision of a patch to keep
track of transaction commit timestamps.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in a patch to fix an issue with bogus WAL
segments archived after promotion by removing the suspect segments at
timeline switch.

Heikki Linnakangas sent in a patch to make WAL archival behave more
sensibly in standby mode.

Álvaro Herrera sent in a patch to distinguish domain constraint from
table constraints.

Robert Haas sent in another revision of a patch to implement parallel
mode and parallel contexts.

Peter Geoghegan sent in a patch to add a new HINT -- a guess as to
what column the user might have intended to reference, to be shown in
various contexts where an ERRCODE_UNDEFINED_COLUMN error is raised.

Andrew Dunstan sent in another revision of a patch to fix psql's
over-eager use of pagers via a pager_min_lines setting.

Tatsuo Ishii sent in another revision of a patch to fix an infelicity
between pgbench -f and vacuum.

Michael Paquier sent in a patch to fix some make problems with the
addition of test programs to contrib.