Re: PG 9.0 and standard_conforming_strings

On Wed, 03 Feb 2010 14:41:13 -0500, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> Indeed it is, which is one of the reasons to be cautious with changing
> it. We've been telling people to move away from \' for a long time,
> but actually flipping the switch that will make their apps insecure
> is not something to do on the spur of the moment.

AFAICT the switch was added in 8.2, and mentioned in the release notes
dated 2006-12-05. The documentation for 8.2 says "The default is
currently
off, causing PostgreSQL to have its historical behavior of treating
backslashes
as escape characters. The default will change to on in a future release
to improve compatibility with the standard."

So people have had three years of warning, which I would hardly
characterize
as "spur of the moment". If you want the old behavior, change the setting
to off.

I think that a major release point is exactly the right time to do this,
doing it at a minor release number is much less reasonable.

A question for those opposed to doing it now: how exactly do you propose
to
warn people that is different than the notice that it will be changed in
a future release that has been around for the last three years?

--
nw