Re: [HACKERS] Re: Postgresql broken

> I am the packager for the RH 5.0 postgres RPM. What's wrong with it ?

Hi Cristian. I'm developing Postgres on RH4.2 at home, and have RH5.0 running at
work. There are three known problems with the Postgres packages (some of which are
likely not directly related to the packaging itself):

1) You have compiled the package with USE_LOCALE enabled. However, neither of my
machines behaves properly with that (including a clean build from source on RH4.2).
The test is to start up psql and try

select '$1.00'::money;

which fails. I believe this works on other platforms, and I distinctly recall getting
this to work on my development machine (in fact I helped implement it), but afaik
that was pre-RH4.2. My small test program which exercises the locale support in libc
also no longer works under RH4.2, though by now that may be from my mucking with it
trying to get it to work.

2) pre-glibc2.0.7 has rounding bugs which cause odd results in some date/time
routines. The test is to try

select '4 hours'::timespan;

which will return '3 hours 59 mins 60 secs' on a machine with problems. We have
reports from someone running Debian that glibc2.0.7-pre1 (?) fixes the problem. Any
idea on when glibc2.0.7 might be available?

3) the ownership of the data area is incorrect as shipped (I assume this is
rpm-specific). On my RH5.0 machine, which is a VAResearch system with Linux/Postgres
preinstalled, the data area was owned by root, and the backend cannot start up. If
the ownership is changed to the postgres account then the backend starts.

> > PostgreSQL-6.3 will be released in a few days, and it would be nice to resolve
> > these issues.

Thanks for building a new RPM. I'll try it at work on my production machine tomorrow.
Also, we will have new documentation in v6.3, including html and hardcopy, and you
will want to repackage that too. Look in the doc directory (in a day or two; I'm
still building the docs and haven't committed anything yet to the source tree).

Best regards.

- Tom