Re: Can we revisit the thought of PostgreSQL 7.2.4?

Neil Conway wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-01-16 at 22:47, Justin Clift wrote:
> > Over the last few days we've had patches submitted for 7.2.3 that
> > address a couple of things, both the WAL Recovery Bug that Tom has
> > developed a patch for, and a couple of buffer overflows that have been
> > widely reported.
>
> The buffer overflows, IMHO, are not sufficient reason to release an
> update. As Tom pointed out, there are lots of other, unpatched overflows
> in 7.2.3 (and the whole class of vulnerability requires SQL access to
> begin with).
>
> As for the "WAL recovery bug", AFAIK no such bug has been reported "in
> the last few days". Exactly what issue are you referring to?

Let's look at the issue here --- I think security fixes are of a
different class from corruption bugs or functionality bugs. For the
latter, fixing those fixes actual problems in the server that actually
improve the capabilities of the database. For security issues, if we
already have ten open doors in a house, does it help to lock two of them
when the other eight are still open? I don't see any improvement in the
functionality of PostgreSQL in such a case, while feature/corruption
fixes _do_ improve the backend code.

I think we have to accept the statement that in 7.2.X malicious SQL
queries can cause database failure, and fixing one or two of the ten
known problems doesn't change that fact.

I don't have a problem with releasing 7.2.4 and including all the fixes,
including security fixes, but I don't see the security fixes _as_ _a_
_reason_ to release a 7.2.4.

So, do we have non-security fixes to warrant a 7.2.X?

--
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