Re: trouble caused by change in 7.3 handling of '' in

Vivek Khera wrote:
> >>>>> "PE" == Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> writes:
>
> PE> It's one thing to have warts for allowing the market-leading GUI frontend
> PE> for databases (MS Access) to work, but if every, with all due respect,
> PE> random client wants to have its own break-the-spec-for-me switch we'll go
> PE> mad.
>
> PE> Explain to me why it's so hard to say 0 when you mean 0.
>
> It is not hard. What is hard is when you change behavior abruptly
> between releases without a transition period in which you warn about
> an upcoming change when that deprecated feature is used. Ideally, it
> would have logged this error for the 7.3 release, and disallowed it
> for 7.4, something akin to the LIMIT transition.
>
> I guess nobody realized how some popular applications used this
> non-compliant feature before the change was implemented. Perhaps we
> learn from this experience and don't do this type of change again.
> Perhaps not.

Yes, this was really it --- we didn't realize how many apps used this.
Also, we expected to hit them before final release, when we could have
reverted the change.

The prompting of the change was that '' -> 0 didn't make sense, and
it was masking some COPY file format errors.

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