Re: Backend misfeasance for DEFAULT NULL

Gregory Stark <stark(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
> "Tom Lane" <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:
>> Is it OK to change this behavior? Should I
>> back-patch, or not?

> I would tend to be more conservative than we've been in the past with
> back patching. We keep saying people should be on the most recent
> point release and people shouldn't be concerned about their
> application breaking. But if we make behaviour changes, even for
> things which are definitely bugs, we make those fears justified.

You have a point, but on reflection I think the odds of this change
breaking an existing application are low. The reason is that in the old
implementation, "DEFAULT NULL" is effectively not there at all, and so
an update to a newer point-release, or even a dump and reload, wouldn't
change the behavior of an existing database. Somebody creating *new*
tables with DDL that includes such a specification would see the
behavioral change, but if they are specifying it that way they'd
probably want it to work. Also, the lack of a complaint from the field
suggests to me that nobody has really been trying to do this anyway ...

Still, fixing only HEAD would be less work for me, so I'm happy with
that if it's the consensus.

regards, tom lane