Continuing to support this backwards-compatibility feature has
nontrivial costs; in particular it is potentially a security hazard
if an application somehow gets confused about which setting the
server is using. We changed the default to ON fifteen years ago,
which seems like enough time for applications to have adapted.
Let's remove support for the legacy string syntax.
We should not remove the GUC altogether, since client-side code will
still test it, pg_dump scripts will attempt to set it to ON, etc.
Instead, just prevent it from being set to OFF. There is precedent
for this approach (see commit de66987ad).
This patch does remove the related GUC escape_string_warning, however.
That setting does nothing when standard_conforming_strings is on,
so it's now useless. We could leave it in place as a do-nothing
setting to avoid breaking clients that still set it, if there are any.
But it seems likely that any such client is also trying to turn off
standard_conforming_strings, so it'll need work anyway.
The client-side changes in this patch are pretty minimal, because even
though we are dropping the server's support, most of our clients still
need to be able to talk to older server versions. We could remove
dead client code only once we disclaim compatibility with pre-v19
servers, which is surely years away. One change of note is that
pg_dump/pg_dumpall now set standard_conforming_strings = on in their
source session, rather than accepting the source server's default.
This ensures that literals in view definitions and such will be
printed in a way that's acceptable to v19+. In particular,
pg_upgrade will work transparently even if the source installation has
standard_conforming_strings = off. (However, pg_restore will behave
the same as before if given an archive file containing
standard_conforming_strings = off. Such an archive will not be safely
restorable into v19+, but we shouldn't break the ability to extract
valid data from it for use with an older server.)
Author: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/3279216.1767072538@sss.pgh.pa.us
A report from Andrew Dunstan showed that an ecpglib breakage that
causes repeated query failures could lead to infinite loops in some
ecpg test scripts, because they contain "while(1)" loops with no
exit condition other than successful test completion. That might
be all right for manual testing, but it seems entirely unacceptable
for automated test environments such as our buildfarm. We don't
want buildfarm owners to have to intervene manually when a test
goes wrong.
To fix, just change all those while(1) loops to exit after at most
100 iterations (which is more than any of them expect to iterate).
This seems sufficient since we'd see discrepancies in the test output
if any loop executed the wrong number of times.
I tested this by dint of intentionally breaking ecpg_do_prologue
to always fail, and verifying that the tests still got to completion.
Back-patch to all supported branches, since the whole point of this
exercise is to protect the buildfarm against future mistakes.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/18693.1548302004@sss.pgh.pa.us
- Really prepare statements
- Added more regression tests
- Added auto-prepare mode
- Use '$n' for positional variables, '?' is still possible via ecpg option
- Cleaned up the sources a little bit
