Re: power() function in Windows: "value out of range: underflow"

On Tue, May 1, 2018 at 1:49 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> The point here, I think, is that you get behavior X on approximately 100%
> of modern platforms, but (without this patch) behavior Y on some number of
> older platforms. People who have tested their app on a modern platform
> and then find that it misbehaves on an old one will think this is a bug
> fix. People who only run their app on an old platform may think the
> pre-patch behavior is fine, in which case they will indeed be upset if
> we change it in a minor release. Are there more of the latter than the
> former? I don't really know, and you don't either.

I agree with all of that.

> But I don't think
> we should discount the existence of the former category. Deploying
> to production on an older release of $system than you develop on
> is hardly an unusual scenario.

That's probably true, but making dev, test, and production boxes
similar is generally good practice and users can do as much or as
little of it as they find they need in order to avoid getting burned.
They can't do anything about behavior changes we inject into minor
releases.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company