On Thursday, June 23, 2016, Robert Haas <
robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 1:12 PM, David G. Johnston
<david.g.johnston@gmail.com> wrote:
> to_timestamp with its present behavior is, IMO, a poorly designed function
> that would never be accepted today. Concrete proposals for either fixing or
> deprecating (or both) are welcome. Fixing it should not cause unnecessary
> errors to be raised.
Sheesh. Who put you in charge of this? You basically seem like you
are trying to shut up anyone who supports this change, and I don't
think that's right.
I'm all for a change in this area - though I'm not impacted enough to actually work on a design proposal. And I'm not sure how asking for ideas constitutes trying to shut people up. Especially since if no one does float a proposal we'll simply have this discussion next year when someone new discovers how badly behaved this function is.
My main point is that I'm inclined to deprecate it.
I can almost guarantee that would make a lot of users very unhappy.
This function is widely used.
Tell people not to use. We'd leave it in, unchanged, on backward compatibility grounds. This seems like acceptable behavior for the project. Am I mistaken?
> My second point is if you are going to use this badly designed function you
> need to protect yourself.
I agree that anyone using this function should test their format
strings carefully.
> My understanding is that is not going to change for 9.6.
That's exactly what is under discussion here.
Ok. I'm having trouble seeing this justified as a bug fix - the docs clearly state our behavior is intentional. Improved behavior, yes, but that's a feature and we're in beta2. Please be specific if you believe I've misinterpreted project policies on this matter.
David J.
