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

--On Thursday, December 19, 2002 12:01:21 -0500 Bruce Momjian
<pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> 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.
IT DID! (see my post during Beta).

You said, well, that's only one.

>
> 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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