• Tom Lane's avatar
    Fix volatility markings of some contrib I/O functions. · 66c029c8
    Tom Lane authored
    In general, datatype I/O functions are supposed to be immutable or at
    worst stable.  Some contrib I/O functions were, through oversight, not
    marked with any volatility property at all, which made them VOLATILE.
    Since (most of) these functions actually behave immutably, the erroneous
    marking isn't terribly harmful; but it can be user-visible in certain
    circumstances, as per a recent bug report from Joe Van Dyk in which a
    cast to text was disallowed in an expression index definition.
    
    To fix, just adjust the declarations in the extension SQL scripts.  If we
    were being very fussy about this, we'd bump the extension version numbers,
    but that seems like more trouble (for both developers and users) than the
    problem is worth.
    
    A fly in the ointment is that chkpass_in actually is volatile, because
    of its use of random() to generate a fresh salt when presented with a
    not-yet-encrypted password.  This is bad because of the general assumption
    that I/O functions aren't volatile: the consequence is that records or
    arrays containing chkpass elements may have input behavior a bit different
    from a bare chkpass column.  But there seems no way to fix this without
    breaking existing usage patterns for chkpass, and the consequences of the
    inconsistency don't seem bad enough to justify that.  So for the moment,
    just document it in a comment.
    
    Since we're not bumping version numbers, there seems no harm in
    back-patching these fixes; at least future installations will get the
    functions marked correctly.
    66c029c8
chkpass--1.0.sql 1.33 KB