Re: gettimeofday cause crash on Windows

On 2015-02-12 22:09:43 +0900, Michael Paquier wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 9:54 PM, Andres Freund <andres(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> > On 2015-02-12 04:48:00 -0800, Michael Paquier wrote:
> >> I didn't follow much the thread implementing this feature, but this
> >> commit has somewhat not taken into account the fact that the contents
> >> of src/port could as well be used for the frontends, per se the
> >> comments on top of init_win32_gettimeofday mentioning only the backend
> >> startup, something not wrong in itself, but not completely right
> >> either. So what we have now is an unpleasant crash trigger for any
> >> client applications on Windows < 2k12 linking to libpqport that call
> >> gettimeofday(). I would not be surprised that we would get bug reports
> >> of the type "why my client binary crashes suddendly with 9.5" if we
> >> keep the code as-is.
> >
> >> So ISTM that your patch does the correct thing by setting
> >> pg_get_system_time to &GetSystemTimeAsFileTime to not break any
> >> existing applications, and that we should as well update any in-core
> >> binary tools to switch to the precise API
> >
> > I think I'd rather have it crash so people are forced to adjust the
> > client applications. The number of things linking to pgport should be
> > rather low.
>
> I'd take it on the safe side, not the hard one :)

Meh. If this were libpq, I'd tend to agree, but it isn't.

> FWIW, applications are not broken if they use GetSystemTimeAsFileTime,
> simply less precise. So we should push for improvements, not mandatory
> moves without a deprecation period.

pgport isn't an actual enduser library. And we feel free to yank stuff
in/out of it all the time.

Greetings,

Andres Freund

--
Andres Freund http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services