HISTORY file

I find the HISTORY file to be distressingly poor to peruse. Reasons:

A large proportion of the items don't convey any useful information.
Examples:

| PLpgSQL fix for SELECT... FOR UPDATE (Tom)

What did this fix? Does SELECT FOR UDPATE now work whereas it didn't use
to? => "SELECT ... FOR UPDATE now works in PL/pgSQL"

| Fix for PL/pgSQL PERFORM returning multiple rows (Tom)

What did this fix? Can you return multiple rows now or does it merely
give an error message that you cannot where it used to crash?

| Fix for inherited CHECK constraints (Stephan Szabo)

ditto

| PL/pgSQL Allow IS and FOR in cursors (Bruce)

If I didn't happen to know exactly what this meant, I wouldn't have a
clue.

| Allow NULL to appear at beginning/end based on ORDER BY (Tom)

It doesn't "allow", it just "does".

| Pltcl add spi_lastoid capability (bob(at)redivi(dot)com)

Capability = command, function, type, ...?

| Allow column renaming in views

ALTER VIEW foo RENAME COLUMN -- huh?

| New option to output SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION commands (Peter E)

Option to what to output where?

| New postgresql.conf option to enable/disable "col = NULL" comparisons

This is not correct.

| Cachability fixes (Thomas, Tom)

I don't think cachability as such was "fixed", or even "changed". The
item probably related to some iscacheable pg_proc entries which were
temporarily broken.

The categories Bug Fixes, Enhancements, Types, Performance, Interfaces,
Source Code could be split better, and they're not used very consistently.
An example from each category that doesn't fit:

Bug Fixes: Disallow access to pg_statistic for non-super user (Tom)
This was not a bug, but a consequence of a change.

Enhancements: Fix TCL COPY TO/FROM (ljb)
If it is "fixed" then it was broken before.

Types: New function bit_length() (Peter E)
No comment.

Performance: Dynahash portability improvements (Tom)

Interfaces: Obviously, anything done in the interfaces is also either a
bug fix or an enhancement. And what exactly constitutes an interface is
not clear to me.

Source code: Remove OID's from some system tables (Tom)
Maybe this is an enhancement.

Some changes are "must know", because they are incompatible, such as

| Load pg_hba.conf only on startup and SIGHUP (Bruce)

This should be made clear somewhere.

Finally,

| Remove configure --enable-pltcl-utf option

There was never such an option in a previous release.

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net http://funkturm.homeip.net/~peter