44fe30fdab
The signedness of the 'char' type in C is implementation-dependent. For instance, 'signed char' is used by default on x86 CPUs, while 'unsigned char' is used on aarch CPUs. Previously, we accidentally let C implementation signedness affect persistent data. This led to inconsistent results when comparing char data across different platforms. This commit introduces a new 'default_char_signedness' field in ControlFileData to store the signedness of the 'char' type. While this change does not encourage the use of 'char' without explicitly specifying its signedness, this field can be used as a hint to ensure consistent behavior for pre-v18 data files that store data sorted by the 'char' type on disk (e.g., GIN and GiST indexes), especially in cross-platform replication scenarios. Newly created database clusters unconditionally set the default char signedness to true. pg_upgrade (with an upcoming commit) changes this flag for clusters if the source database cluster has signedness=false. As a result, signedness=false setting will become rare over time. If we had known about the problem during the last development cycle that forced initdb (v8.3), we would have made all clusters signed or all clusters unsigned. Making pg_upgrade the only source of signedness=false will cause the population of database clusters to converge toward that retrospective ideal. Bump catalog version (for the catalog changes) and PG_CONTROL_VERSION (for the additions in ControlFileData). Reviewed-by: Noah Misch <noah@leadboat.com> Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CB11ADBC-0C3F-4FE0-A678-666EE80CBB07%40amazon.com
PostgreSQL Database Management System
This directory contains the source code distribution of the PostgreSQL database management system.
PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types and functions. This distribution also contains C language bindings.
Copyright and license information can be found in the file COPYRIGHT.
General documentation about this version of PostgreSQL can be found at https://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/. In particular, information about building PostgreSQL from the source code can be found at https://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/installation.html.
The latest version of this software, and related software, may be obtained at https://www.postgresql.org/download/. For more information look at our web site located at https://www.postgresql.org/.