Horton

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

Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>

View thread View on postgr.es
From: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
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: 2020-09-30T20:49:51Z
Lists: pgsql-bugs, pgsql-hackers 
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.

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

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