2010-03-15
This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.4.2. For information about new features in the 8.4 major release, see Section E.32, « Release 8.4 ».
A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.4.X. However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.4.2, see the release notes for 8.4.2.
Add new configuration parameter ssl_renegotiation_limit to control how often we do session key renegotiation for an SSL connection (Magnus)
This can be set to zero to disable renegotiation completely, which may be required if a broken SSL library is used. In particular, some vendors are shipping stopgap patches for CVE-2009-3555 that cause renegotiation attempts to fail.
Fix possible deadlock during backend startup (Tom)
Fix possible crashes due to not handling errors during relcache reload cleanly (Tom)
Fix possible crash due to use of dangling pointer to a cached plan (Tatsuo)
Fix possible crash due to overenthusiastic invalidation of cached plan for ROLLBACK (Tom)
Fix possible crashes when trying to recover from a failure in subtransaction start (Tom)
Fix server memory leak associated with use of savepoints and a client encoding different from server's encoding (Tom)
Fix incorrect WAL data emitted during end-of-recovery cleanup of a GIST index page split (Yoichi Hirai)
This would result in index corruption, or even more likely an error during WAL replay, if we were unlucky enough to crash during end-of-recovery cleanup after having completed an incomplete GIST insertion.
Fix bug in WAL redo cleanup method for GIN indexes (Heikki)
Fix incorrect comparison of scan key in GIN index search (Teodor)
Make substring() for bit types treat any negative length as meaning « all the rest of the string » (Tom)
The previous coding treated only -1 that way, and would produce an invalid result value for other negative values, possibly leading to a crash (CVE-2010-0442).
Fix integer-to-bit-string conversions to handle the first fractional byte correctly when the output bit width is wider than the given integer by something other than a multiple of 8 bits (Tom)
Fix some cases of pathologically slow regular expression matching (Tom)
Fix bug occurring when trying to inline a SQL function that returns a set of a composite type that contains dropped columns (Tom)
Fix bug with trying to update a field of an element of a composite-type array column (Tom)
Avoid failure when EXPLAIN has to print a FieldStore or assignment ArrayRef expression (Tom)
These cases can arise now that EXPLAIN VERBOSE tries to print plan node target lists.
Avoid an unnecessary coercion failure in some cases where an undecorated literal string appears in a subquery within UNION/INTERSECT/EXCEPT (Tom)
This fixes a regression for some cases that worked before 8.4.
Avoid undesirable rowtype compatibility check failures in some cases where a whole-row Var has a rowtype that contains dropped columns (Tom)
Fix the STOP WAL LOCATION entry in backup history files to report the next WAL segment's name when the end location is exactly at a segment boundary (Itagaki Takahiro)
Always pass the catalog ID to an option validator function specified in CREATE FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER (Martin Pihlak)
Fix some more cases of temporary-file leakage (Heikki)
This corrects a problem introduced in the previous minor release. One case that failed is when a plpgsql function returning set is called within another function's exception handler.
Add support for doing FULL JOIN ON FALSE (Tom)
This prevents a regression from pre-8.4 releases for some queries that can now be simplified to a constant-false join condition.
Improve constraint exclusion processing of boolean-variable cases, in particular make it possible to exclude a partition that has a « bool_column = false » constraint (Tom)
Prevent treating an INOUT cast as representing binary compatibility (Heikki)
Include column name in the message when warning about inability to grant or revoke column-level privileges (Stephen Frost)
This is more useful than before and helps to prevent confusion when a REVOKE generates multiple messages, which formerly appeared to be duplicates.
When reading pg_hba.conf and related files, do not treat @something as a file inclusion request if the @ appears inside quote marks; also, never treat @ by itself as a file inclusion request (Tom)
This prevents erratic behavior if a role or database name starts with @. If you need to include a file whose path name contains spaces, you can still do so, but you must write @"/path to/file" rather than putting the quotes around the whole construct.
Prevent infinite loop on some platforms if a directory is named as an inclusion target in pg_hba.conf and related files (Tom)
Fix possible infinite loop if SSL_read or SSL_write fails without setting errno (Tom)
This is reportedly possible with some Windows versions of openssl.
Disallow GSSAPI authentication on local connections, since it requires a hostname to function correctly (Magnus)
Protect ecpg against applications freeing strings unexpectedly (Michael)
Make ecpg report the proper SQLSTATE if the connection disappears (Michael)
Fix translation of cell contents in psql \d output (Heikki)
Fix psql's numericlocale option to not format strings it shouldn't in latex and troff output formats (Heikki)
Fix a small per-query memory leak in psql (Tom)
Make psql return the correct exit status (3) when ON_ERROR_STOP and --single-transaction are both specified and an error occurs during the implied COMMIT (Bruce)
Fix pg_dump's output of permissions for foreign servers (Heikki)
Fix possible crash in parallel pg_restore due to out-of-range dependency IDs (Tom)
Fix plpgsql failure in one case where a composite column is set to NULL (Tom)
Fix possible failure when calling PL/Perl functions from PL/PerlU or vice versa (Tim Bunce)
Add volatile markings in PL/Python to avoid possible compiler-specific misbehavior (Zdenek Kotala)
Ensure PL/Tcl initializes the Tcl interpreter fully (Tom)
The only known symptom of this oversight is that the Tcl clock command misbehaves if using Tcl 8.5 or later.
Prevent ExecutorEnd from being run on portals created within a failed transaction or subtransaction (Tom)
This is known to cause issues when using contrib/auto_explain.
Prevent crash in contrib/dblink when too many key columns are specified to a dblink_build_sql_* function (Rushabh Lathia, Joe Conway)
Allow zero-dimensional arrays in contrib/ltree operations (Tom)
This case was formerly rejected as an error, but it's more convenient to treat it the same as a zero-element array. In particular this avoids unnecessary failures when an ltree operation is applied to the result of ARRAY(SELECT ...) and the sub-select returns no rows.
Fix assorted crashes in contrib/xml2 caused by sloppy memory management (Tom)
Make building of contrib/xml2 more robust on Windows (Andrew)
Fix race condition in Windows signal handling (Radu Ilie)
One known symptom of this bug is that rows in pg_listener could be dropped under heavy load.
Make the configure script report failure if the C compiler does not provide a working 64-bit integer datatype (Tom)
This case has been broken for some time, and no longer seems worth supporting, so just reject it at configure time instead.
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2010e for DST law changes in Bangladesh, Chile, Fiji, Mexico, Paraguay, Samoa.