Port Bug Report: Problem concerns copy command with big oids

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POSTGRESQL BUG REPORT TEMPLATE
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Your name : Helmar Spangenberg
Your email address : hspangenberg(at)frey(dot)de

Category : runtime: back-end
Severity : serious

Summary: Problem concerns copy command with big oids

System Configuration
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Operating System : Linux 2.0.36

PostgreSQL version : 6.4

Compiler used : egcs 1.1.1

Hardware:
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Dual Pentium, 384M RAM
uname -a:
Linux godzilla 2.0.36 #8 Thu Jan 21 16:10:41 MET 1999 i686 unknown

Versions of other tools:
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We used postgresql of the SuSE 6.0 dist.
flex 2.5.4
GNU Make version 3.76.1

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Problem Description:
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Using the SQL-command "COPY ... FROM" leads to the death of
the backend when the oid-counter steps over the 2 billion
frontier. As far as we could test, the other commands worked
fine.

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Test Case:
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In our installation all 3 hours app. 4000000 datasets are
cleared and reinstalled using the copy command. After the
oids got bigger than 2147483647 the backend died during the
copy command. After a fresh installation of Postgres (oids
now starting again at 0) everything worked fine again.

Not a fix, but maybe a hint:
It seems to me that the internal representation of the oids
is not consistent (long int - unsigned long int). I
realized that the oid of ONE dataset sometimes was printed
as a negative number and in other cases as a positive
number (when big enough).

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Solution:
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