== Postgres Weekly News - December 30 2007 ==

== Postgres Weekly News - December 30 2007 ==

Happy New Year!

Despite the "vacaction" week, lots of activity has been happening.
See the patch list for details.

== Postgres Product News ==

GNUmed 0.2.8.0 released.
http://wiki.gnumed.de

Pgtcl-ng 1.6.1 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgtclng/

Viewalyzer 1.0.2 released.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/viewalyzer/

xTuple Apps 2.3 released.
http://www.xtuple.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4281&Itemid=1

== Postgres Jobs for December ==

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2007-12/threads.php

== Postgres Local ==

PGCon 2008 will be May 20-23 in Ottawa - now accepting proposals.
http://www.pgcon.org/2008/papers.php

The BSD and PostgreSQL teams share a developer room at FOSDEM 2008 in
Brussels February 23-34, 2008. If you want to give a talk or help
managing the dev room, contact fosdem(at)pgug(dot)eu(dot) For more information,
see:
http://fosdem.org/2008/schedule/devroom/bsdpostgresql

PostgreSQL Conference East '08 talks are March 29 and 30 at the
University of Maryland, College Park.
http://www.postgresqlconference.org/

FISL 9.0 will be happening April 17-19, 2008 at PUCRS in Porto Alegre,
Brazil. Talk proposals are due by January 11, 2008.
https://fisl.softwarelivre.org/9.0/

== Postgres in the News ==

Planet PostgreSQL: http://www.planetpostgresql.org/

General Bits, Archives and occasional new articles:
http://www.varlena.com/GeneralBits/

Postgres Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter

Submit news and announcements by Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific time.
Please send English language ones to david(at)fetter(dot)org, German language
to pwn(at)pgug(dot)de, Italian language to pwn(at)itpug(dot)org(dot)

== Applied Patches ==

Alvaro Herrera committed:

- In pgsql/contrib/uuid-ossp: uuid-ossp.c, add missing return code
checks in the uuid-ossp contrib module, per bug #3841.

Andrew Dunstan committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/commands/copy.c, add sanity check to ensure
delimiter and quote are different in CSV mode.

Michael Meskes committed:

- In ecpg, applied patch send by ITAGAKI Takahiro to fix bug in
connect statement if user name is a variable. Also fixed test case
that didn't detect this.

Tom Lane committed:

- In pgsql/src/backend/commands/copy.c, swap the order of testing for
control characters and for column delimiter in
CopyAttributeOutText(), so that control characters are converted to
the C-style escape sequences even if they happen to be equal to the
column delimiter (as is true by default for tab, for example).
Oversight in my previous patch to restore pre-8.3 behavior of COPY
OUT escaping. Per report from Tomas Szepe.

- In pgsql/src/backend/commands/copy.c, fix ill-advised usage of x?y:z
expressions in errmsg() and errhint() calls. This prevented gettext
from recognizing the strings that need to be translated.

- In pgsql/src/backend/commands/copy.c, disallow digits and lower-case
ASCII letters as the delimiter in non-CSV COPY. We need a
restriction here because when the delimiter occurs as a data
character, it is emitted with a backslash, and that will only work
as desired if CopyReadAttributesText() will interpret the backslash
sequence as representing the second character literally. This is
currently untrue for 'b', 'f', 'n', 'r', 't', 'v', 'x', and octal
digits. For future-proofing and simplicity of explanation, it seems
best to disallow a-z and 0-9. We must also disallow dot, since "\."
by itself would look like copy EOF. Note: "\N" is by default the
null print string, so N would also cause a problem, but that is
already tested for.

- Improve consistency of error reporting in GUC assign_hook routines.
Some were reporting ERROR for interactive assignments and LOG for
other cases, some were saying nothing for non-interactive cases, and
a few did yet other things. Make them use a new function
GUC_complaint_elevel() to establish a reasonably uniform policy
about how to report. There are still a few edge cases such as
assign_search_path(), but it's much better than before. Per gripe
from Devrim Gunduz and subsequent discussion. As noted by Alvaro,
it'd be better to fold these custom messages into the standard
"invalid parameter value" complaint from guc.c, perhaps as the
DETAIL field. However that will require more redesign than seems
prudent for 8.3. This is a relatively safe, low-impact change that
we can afford to risk now.

- Update examples in planstats.sgml for 8.3, and improve some aspects
of that discussion. Add a link from perform.sgml.

- Improve a number of elog messages for not-supposed-to-happen cases
in btrees, since these seem to happen after all in corrupted
indexes. Make sure we supply the index name in all cases, and
provide relevant block numbers where available. Also consistently
identify the index name as such. Back-patch to 8.2, in hopes that
this might help Mason Hale figure out his problem.

Peter Eisentraut committed:

- Wording improvements in pgsql/src/backend/tsearch/ts_utils.c,
pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/tsquery.c,
pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/tsquery_cleanup.c,
pgsql/src/backend/utils/adt/tsvector_op.c,
pgsql/src/backend/utils/misc/guc.c and pgsql/src/port/open.c.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/docguide.sgml, update required TeX settings.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/stylesheet.dsl, disable LOT for the time being
because of TeX problems.

- In pgsql/src/port/open.c, change may to might.

Bruce Momjian committed:

- Add documentation section about preventing server spoofing. Update
SSL documention to be clearer about certificates, and restructure
for clarity.

- Add two documentation tables to outline SSL file usage for client
and server.

- Update docs to clarify purpose of SSL key file.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/libpq.sgml, update docs: client always gets
server certificate.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/runtime.sgml, document problem with NULL SSL
ciphers and man-in-the-middle attacks.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/runtime.sgml, improve wording of NULL SSL
cipher.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/client-auth.sgml, update docs mentioning PAM
doesn't work reading /etc/passwd because of non-root. Dhanaraj M

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/runtime.sgml, document that null ciphers are
not recommended. Mark Mielke

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/runtime.sgml, remove tab in file name.

- In pgsql/doc/src/sgml/wal.sgml, document how to control the disk
write cache on Solaris. Zdenek Kotala

- Update Japanese FAQ. Jun Kuwamura.

- Add to TODO: Allow SSL authentication/encryption over unix domain
sockets.
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2007-12/msg00924.php

- Remove TODO.detail for pg_upgrade.

- Update TODO list based on 8.3 completed items.

== Rejected Patches (for now) ==

No one was disappointed this week :-)

== Pending Patches ==

Hans-Juergen Schoenig sent in a patch which updates Evgen Potemkin's
CONNECT BY PRIOR patch.