Attached patch will add a version() function to Postges, e.g.

template1=> select version();
version
------------------------------------------------------------
PostgreSQL 6.3.2 on i586-pc-linux-gnu, compiled by gcc 2.8.1
(1 row)

If PQfn() receives NOTICEs from the backend, it fails because there is no
provision to deal with them.

This patch (supplied by Anders Hammarquist <iko@netg.se> to me as Debian
maintainer of postgresql) cures the problem:

Include small section on authoring and Makefile configuration.
Rearrange section order.

 when building executables.

Hi, here are patches I promised (against 6.3.2):

* character_length(), position(), substring() are now aware of
          multi-byte characters
* add octet_length()
* add --with-mb option to configure
* new regression tests for EUC_KR
  (contributed by "Soonmyung. Hong" <hong@lunaris.hanmesoft.co.kr>)
* add some test cases to the EUC_JP regression test
* fix problem in regress/regress.sh in case of System V
* fix toupper(), tolower() to handle 8bit chars

note that:

o  patches for both configure.in and configure are
included. maybe the one for configure is not necessary.

o pg_proc.h was modified to add octet_length(). I used OIDs
(1374-1379) for that. Please let me know if these numbers are not
appropriate.

  I do not know about these contributions well as I only made the binaries
to contribute to a Japanese Linux package.(I did not test them.)  But I
try to make some brief introduction about the contrib directory with my
poor English.  Here is a draft of README about contrib directory:

From: Zeugswetter Andreas SARZ <Andreas.Zeugswetter@telecom.at>

HP-UX (all versions) requires shared libraries to have execute
permission, and really needs them to be exactly mode 555 for
performance reasons.  The standard configure/install procedure
installs libpq.sl as mode 644, which DOES NOT WORK.

The attached patch modifies the makefiles to distinguish
INSTL_LIB_OPTS (install mode for ordinary libraries) from
INSTL_SHLIB_OPTS (mode for shared libs), and adds a test
to configure to set INSTL_SHLIB_OPTS="-m 555" when on HP-UX.

        Ok, I have finally gotten all of the defines for Dec/Alpha and
Linux/Alpha sorted out as Marc asked. There is no longer any need for
'-Dalpha' or '-Dlinuxalpha' in either the Dec/Alpha or the Linux/Alpha
template files (./src/template/{alpha,linuxalpha}). I have replaced every
instance of 'alpha' or '__alpha__' with '__alpha', as that appears to be
the common symbol between C compilers on both operating systems (RH4.2 &
DecUnix 4.0b) for alpha.

And the next update. Now you can use only parts of a struct like this:

exec sql select a into :struct.string from foo;