• Tom Lane's avatar
    Fix incorrect declaration of citext's regexp_matches() functions. · b22527f2
    Tom Lane authored
    These functions should return SETOF TEXT[], like the core functions they
    are wrappers for; but they were incorrectly declared as returning just
    TEXT[].  This mistake had two results: first, if there was no match you got
    a scalar null result, whereas what you should get is an empty set (zero
    rows).  Second, the 'g' flag was effectively ignored, since you would get
    only one result array even if there were multiple matches, as reported by
    Jeff Certain.
    
    While ignoring 'g' is a clear bug, the behavior for no matches might well
    have been thought to be the intended behavior by people who hadn't compared
    it carefully to the core regexp_matches() functions.  So we should tread
    carefully about introducing this change in the back branches.  Still, it
    clearly is a bug and so providing some fix is desirable.
    
    After discussion, the conclusion was to introduce the change in a 1.1
    version of the citext extension (as we would need to do anyway); 1.0 still
    contains the incorrect behavior.  1.1 is the default and only available
    version in HEAD, but it is optional in the back branches, where 1.0 remains
    the default version.  People wishing to adopt the fix in back branches will
    need to explicitly do ALTER EXTENSION citext UPDATE TO '1.1'.  (I also
    provided a downgrade script in the back branches, so people could go back
    to 1.0 if necessary.)
    
    This should be called out as an incompatible change in the 9.5 release
    notes, although we'll also document it in the next set of back-branch
    release notes.  The notes should mention that any views or rules that use
    citext's regexp_matches() functions will need to be dropped before
    upgrading to 1.1, and then recreated again afterwards.
    
    Back-patch to 9.1.  The bug goes all the way back to citext's introduction
    in 8.4, but pre-9.1 there is no extension mechanism with which to manage
    the change.  Given the lack of previous complaints it seems unnecessary to
    change this behavior in 9.0, anyway.
    b22527f2
citext.sql 32.5 KB