These reference pages still claimed that you have to be superuser to create
a database or schema owned by a different role. That was true before 8.1,
but it was changed in commits aa1110624c and
f91370cd2f to allow assignment of ownership
to any role you are a member of. However, at the time we were thinking of
that primarily as a change to the ALTER OWNER rules, so the need to touch
these two CREATE ref pages got missed.
The syntax "su -c 'command' username" is not accepted by all versions of
su, for example not OpenBSD's. More portable is "su username -c
'command'". So change runtime.sgml to recommend that syntax. Also,
add a -D switch to the OpenBSD example script, for consistency with other
examples. Per Denis Lapshin and Gábor Hidvégi.
Somewhere along the line, somebody decided to remove all trace of this
notation from the documentation text. It was still in the command syntax
synopses, or at least some of them, but with no indication what it meant.
This will not do, as evidenced by the confusion apparent in bug #7543;
even if the notation is now unnecessary, people will find it in legacy
SQL code and need to know what it does.
The documentation mentioned setting autovacuum_freeze_max_age to
"its maximum allowed value of a little less than two billion".
This led to a post asking about the exact maximum allowed value,
which is precisely two billion, not "a little less".
Based on question by Radovan Jablonovsky. Backpatch to 8.3.
libxslt offers the ability to read and write both files and URLs through
stylesheet commands, thus allowing unprivileged database users to both read
and write data with the privileges of the database server. Disable that
through proper use of libxslt's security options.
Also, remove xslt_process()'s ability to fetch documents and stylesheets
from external files/URLs. While this was a documented "feature", it was
long regarded as a terrible idea. The fix for CVE-2012-3489 broke that
capability, and rather than expend effort on trying to fix it, we're just
going to summarily remove it.
While the ability to write as well as read makes this security hole
considerably worse than CVE-2012-3489, the problem is mitigated by the fact
that xslt_process() is not available unless contrib/xml2 is installed,
and the longstanding warnings about security risks from that should have
discouraged prudent DBAs from installing it in security-exposed databases.
Reported and fixed by Peter Eisentraut.
Security: CVE-2012-3488
This backatches Heikki's patch in 140a4fbf1a
to make sure the documentation on the website gets updated, since
we're regularly receiving complains about this link.
In backup.sgml, point out that you need to be using the logging collector
if you want to log messages from a failing archive_command script. (This
is an oversimplification, in that it will work without the collector as
long as you're not sending postmaster stderr to /dev/null; but it seems
like a good idea to encourage use of the collector to avoid problems
with multiple processes concurrently scribbling on one file.)
In config.sgml, do some wordsmithing of logging_collector discussion.
Per bug #6518 from Janning Vygen
This check was overlooked when we added function execute permissions to the
system years ago. For an ordinary trigger function it's not a big deal,
since trigger functions execute with the permissions of the table owner,
so they couldn't do anything the user issuing the CREATE TRIGGER couldn't
have done anyway. However, if a trigger function is SECURITY DEFINER,
that is not the case. The lack of checking would allow another user to
install it on his own table and then invoke it with, essentially, forged
input data; which the trigger function is unlikely to realize, so it might
do something undesirable, for instance insert false entries in an audit log
table.
Reported by Dinesh Kumar, patch by Robert Haas
Security: CVE-2012-0866
The documentation neglected to explain its behavior in a script file
(it only ends execution of the script, not psql as a whole), and failed
to mention the long form \quit either.
This example wasn't updated when we changed the behavior of bpcharlen()
in 8.0, nor when we changed the number of parameters taken by the bpchar()
cast function in 7.3. Per report from lsliang.
This is a dangerous example to provide because on machines with GNU cp,
it will silently do the wrong thing and risk archive corruption. Worse,
during the 9.0 cycle somebody "improved" the discussion by removing the
warning that used to be there about that, and instead leaving the
impression that the command would work as desired on most Unixen.
It doesn't. Try to rectify the damage by providing an example that is safe
most everywhere, and then noting that you can try cp -i if you want but
you'd better test that.
In back-patching this to all supported branches, I also added an example
command for Windows, which wasn't provided before 9.0.
The documentation of the columns collection_type_identifier and
dtd_identifier was wrong. This effectively reverts commits
8e1ccad519 and
57352df66d and updates the name
array_type_identifier (the name in SQL:1999) to
collection_type_identifier.
closes bug #5926
Apparently sane-looking penalty code might return small negative values,
for example because of roundoff error. This will confuse places like
gistchoose(). Prevent problems by clamping negative penalty values to
zero. (Just to be really sure, I also made it force NaNs to zero.)
Back-patch to all supported branches.
Alexander Korotkov
On closer inspection, that two-element initcond value seems to have been
a little white lie to avoid explaining the full behavior of float8_accum.
But if people are going to expect the examples to be exactly correct,
I suppose we'd better explain. Per comment from Thom Brown.
Recent versions of the Linux system header files cause xlogdefs.h to
believe that open_datasync should be the default sync method, whereas
formerly fdatasync was the default on Linux. open_datasync is a bad
choice, first because it doesn't actually outperform fdatasync (in fact
the reverse), and second because we try to use O_DIRECT with it, causing
failures on certain filesystems (e.g., ext4 with data=journal option).
This part of the patch is largely per a proposal from Marti Raudsepp.
More extensive changes are likely to follow in HEAD, but this is as much
change as we want to back-patch.
Also clean up confusing code and incorrect documentation surrounding the
fsync_writethrough option. Those changes shouldn't result in any actual
behavioral change, but I chose to back-patch them anyway to keep the
branches looking similar in this area.
In 9.0 and HEAD, also do some copy-editing on the WAL Reliability
documentation section.
Back-patch to all supported branches, since any of them might get used
on modern Linux versions.
