On Sun, Aug 13, 2017 at 12:57 PM, Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:
> FWIW, I'm personally quite demotivated by this style of handling
> issues. You're essentially saying that any code change, even if it just
> increases exposure of a preexisting bug, needs to be handled by the
> committer of the exposing change. And even if that bug is on a platform
> the committer doesn't have. And all that despite the issue getting
> attention.
I don't think you can generalize from what Noah said like that,
because it's always a matter of degree (the degree to which the
preexisting bug was a problem). Abbreviated keys for collated text
were disabled, though not due to bug in strxfrm(). Technically, it was
due to a bug in strcoll(), which glibc always had. strxfrm() therefore
only failed to be bug compatible with glibc's strcoll(). Does that
mean that we were wrong to disable the use of strxfrm() for
abbreviated keys?
I think that it's useful for these things to be handled in an
adversarial manner, in the same way that litigation is adversarial in
a common law court. I doubt that Noah actually set out to demoralize
anyone. He is just doing the job he was assigned.
--
Peter Geoghegan