Providing this information as plain text was doubtless worth the trouble
ten years ago, but it seems likely that hardly anyone reads it in this
format anymore. And the effort required to maintain these files (in the
form of extra-complex markup rules in the relevant parts of the SGML
documentation) is significant. So, let's stop doing that and rely solely
on the other documentation formats.
Per discussion, the plain-text INSTALL instructions might still be worth
their keep, so we continue to generate that file.
Rather than remove HISTORY and src/test/regress/README from distribution
tarballs entirely, replace them with simple stub files that tell the reader
where to find the relevant documentation. This is mainly to avoid possibly
breaking packaging recipes that expect these files to exist.
Back-patch to all supported branches, because simplifying the markup
requirements for release notes won't help much unless we do it in all
branches.
For rather inscrutable reasons, SQL:2008 disallows copying-and-modifying a
window definition that has any explicit framing clause. The error message
we gave for this only made sense if the referencing window definition
itself contains an explicit framing clause, which it might well not.
Moreover, in the context of an OVER clause it's not exactly obvious that
"OVER (windowname)" implies copy-and-modify while "OVER windowname" does
not. This has led to multiple complaints, eg bug #5199 from Iliya
Krapchatov. Change to a hopefully more intelligible error message, and
in the case where we have just "OVER (windowname)", add a HINT suggesting
that omitting the parentheses will fix it. Also improve the related
documentation. Back-patch to all supported branches.
Make it easier for readers of the FP docs to find out about possibly
truncated values.
Per complaint from Tom Duffey in message
F0E0F874-C86F-48D1-AA2A-0C5365BF5118@trillitech.com
Author: Albe Laurenz
Reviewed by: Abhijit Menon-Sen
Adjust the wording in the first para of "Sequence Manipulation Functions"
so that neither of the link phrases in it break across line boundaries,
in either A4- or US-page-size PDF output. This fixes a reported build
failure for the 9.3beta2 A4 PDF docs, and future-proofs this particular
para against causing similar problems in future. (Perhaps somebody will
fix this issue in the SGML/TeX documentation tool chain someday, but I'm
not holding my breath.)
Back-patch to all supported branches, since the same problem could rise up
to bite us in future updates if anyone changes anything earlier than this
in func.sgml.
Restore 4-byte designation for docs. Fix 9.3 doc query to properly pad
to four digits.
Backpatch to all active branches
Per suggestions from Ian Lawrence Barwick
I changed this in commit fd15dba543, but
missed the fact that the SGML documentation of the function specified
exactly what it did. Well, one of the two places where it's specified
documented that --- probably I looked at the other place and thought
nothing needed to be done. Sync the two places where encode() and
decode() are described.
Doing that results in a broken index entry in PDF output. We had only
a few like that, which is probably why nobody noticed before.
Standardize on putting the <term> first.
Josh Kupershmidt
The docs showed that early-January dates can be considered part of the
previous year for week-counting purposes, but failed to say explicitly
that late-December dates can also be considered part of the next year.
Fix that, and add a cross-reference to the "isoyear" field. Per bug
#7967 from Pawel Kobylak.
This function was misdeclared to take cstring when it should take internal.
This at least allows crashing the server, and in principle an attacker
might be able to use the function to examine the contents of server memory.
The correct fix is to adjust the system catalog contents (and fix the
regression tests that should have caught this but failed to). However,
asking users to correct the catalog contents in existing installations
is a pain, so as a band-aid fix for the back branches, install a check
in enum_recv() to make it throw error if called with a cstring argument.
We will later revert this in HEAD in favor of correcting the catalogs.
Our thanks to Sumit Soni (via Secunia SVCRP) for reporting this issue.
Security: CVE-2013-0255
My "fix" for bugs #7578 and #6116 on DROP OWNED at fe3b5eb08a not only
misstated that it applied to REASSIGN OWNED (which it did not affect),
but it also failed to fix the problems fully, because I didn't test the
case of owned shared objects. Thus I created a new bug, reported by
Thomas Kellerer as #7748, which would cause DROP OWNED to fail with a
not-for-user-consumption error message. The code would attempt to drop
the database, which not only fails to work because the underlying code
does not support that, but is a pretty dangerous and undesirable thing
to be doing as well.
This patch fixes that bug by having DROP OWNED only attempt to process
shared objects when grants on them are found, ignoring ownership.
Backpatch to 8.3, which is as far as the previous bug was backpatched.
These reference pages still claimed that you have to be superuser to create
a database or schema owned by a different role. That was true before 8.1,
but it was changed in commits aa1110624c and
f91370cd2f to allow assignment of ownership
to any role you are a member of. However, at the time we were thinking of
that primarily as a change to the ALTER OWNER rules, so the need to touch
these two CREATE ref pages got missed.
The syntax "su -c 'command' username" is not accepted by all versions of
su, for example not OpenBSD's. More portable is "su username -c
'command'". So change runtime.sgml to recommend that syntax. Also,
add a -D switch to the OpenBSD example script, for consistency with other
examples. Per Denis Lapshin and Gábor Hidvégi.
Somewhere along the line, somebody decided to remove all trace of this
notation from the documentation text. It was still in the command syntax
synopses, or at least some of them, but with no indication what it meant.
This will not do, as evidenced by the confusion apparent in bug #7543;
even if the notation is now unnecessary, people will find it in legacy
SQL code and need to know what it does.
The documentation mentioned setting autovacuum_freeze_max_age to
"its maximum allowed value of a little less than two billion".
This led to a post asking about the exact maximum allowed value,
which is precisely two billion, not "a little less".
Based on question by Radovan Jablonovsky. Backpatch to 8.3.
libxslt offers the ability to read and write both files and URLs through
stylesheet commands, thus allowing unprivileged database users to both read
and write data with the privileges of the database server. Disable that
through proper use of libxslt's security options.
Also, remove xslt_process()'s ability to fetch documents and stylesheets
from external files/URLs. While this was a documented "feature", it was
long regarded as a terrible idea. The fix for CVE-2012-3489 broke that
capability, and rather than expend effort on trying to fix it, we're just
going to summarily remove it.
While the ability to write as well as read makes this security hole
considerably worse than CVE-2012-3489, the problem is mitigated by the fact
that xslt_process() is not available unless contrib/xml2 is installed,
and the longstanding warnings about security risks from that should have
discouraged prudent DBAs from installing it in security-exposed databases.
Reported and fixed by Peter Eisentraut.
Security: CVE-2012-3488
