On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 11:32 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> I do not think that end users can be expected to know whether this is safe
> to turn on, and TBH I do not think that most packagers will either. My
> opinion is that our only guaranteed-safe option is to turn it off, period,
> no exceptions for platforms that we've not yet found a failure case for.
> We can consider turning it back on later, once we've done vastly more
> study and testing than has evidently been done to date. One thing I'm
> going to want to know is what was the root cause of glibc's bug, and what
> is the reason to think that other implementations are going to be any more
> reliable. At this point I'm disinclined to trust any implementation that
> can't point to a structural reason (e.g., sharing code) to believe that
> strcoll and strxfrm must yield equivalent answers.
The more I think about it, the more I agree that not trusting
strxfrm() across the board is the right move short-term. So, I'm not
going to be upset, provided we do actually follow through later with
an effort to turn it back on in 9.5 as as when it is known to be
reliable. All I'm asking for is that we actively work towards making
it safe, which evidently requires leg-work, that I can only do part
of. (For example, I'm not on the -packagers list, so cannot really
coordinate with packagers).
I think that that's a reasonable thing for me to expect.
--
Peter Geoghegan
