Re: column size too large, is this a bug?

Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> writes:
>> Oh, good eye ... it's that infamous CONNECT BY patch again, without doubt.

> Hey, who does this patch? What's wrong wiith it?

I'm just venting my annoyance at people expecting us to support
hacked-up versions, especially without telling us they're hacked-up.
This is the third or fourth trouble report I can recall that was
eventually traced to that patch (after considerable effort).

Anyway, my guess for the immediate problem is incorrect installation of
the patch, viz not doing a complete "make clean" and rebuild after
patching. The patch changes the Query struct which is referenced in
many more files than are actually modified by the patch, and so if you
didn't build with --enable-depend then a simple "make" will leave you
with a patchwork of files that have different ideas about the field
offsets in Query. I'm a bit surprised it doesn't just dump core...

(That's not directly the fault of the patch, though, except to the
extent that it can be blamed for coming without adequate installation
instructions. What is directly the fault of the patch is that it
doesn't force an initdb by changing catversion. The prior trouble
reports had to do with views not working because their stored rules were
incompatible with the patched backend. We should not have had to deal
with that, and neither should those users.)

Theory B, of course, is that this is an actual bug in the patch and not
just incorrect installation. I'm not interested enough to investigate
though.

regards, tom lane