Horton

Re: BUG #16419: wrong parsing BC year in to_date() function

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

View thread View on postgr.es
From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
Cc: Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>, "David G. Johnston" <david.g.johnston@gmail.com>, Laurenz Albe <laurenz.albe@cybertec.at>, PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2020-09-30T21:35:43Z
Lists: pgsql-bugs, pgsql-hackers 
Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> On Tue, Sep 29, 2020 at 1:26 PM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> I think this is nuts.  The current behavior is obviously broken;
>> we should just treat it as a bug and fix it, including back-patching.
>> I do not think there is a compatibility problem of any significance.
>> Who out there is going to have an application that is relying on the
>> ability to insert BC dates in this way?

> I think that's entirely the wrong way to look at it. If nobody is
> using the feature, then it will not break anything to change the
> behavior, but on the other hand there is no reason to fix the bug
> either. But if people are using the feature, making it behave
> differently in the next minor release is going to break their
> applications. I disagree *strongly* with making such changes in stable
> branches and feel that the change to those branches should be
> reverted.

By that logic, we should never fix any bug in a back branch.

			regards, tom lane

Commits

  1. Fix handling of BC years in to_date/to_timestamp.

  2. Fix make_timestamp[tz] to accept negative years as meaning BC.

  3. doc: PG 13 relnotes, update TOAST item to mention decompression