On Thu, Feb 19, 1998 at 02:19:24AM -0800, Alistair Crooks wrote:

> Whilst this is great news (with my packages hat on), I'd like to
> know if:

I'll answer as best I can -- but do note that I'm _not_ one of the
PostgreSQL developers.  I just track their beta process, trying to
make sure it runs on my two current platforms; NetBSD 1.3 on Sparc
and VAX.

> 1. the PostgreSQL team have restored case-sensitivity to field and
> table names in 6.3

They are case sensitive, but you have to quote them to avoid the
automatic upper casing demanded by the SQL standard.

> 2. the PostgreSQL team have put back time-travel (rather than
> insisting it's done at "the user level")

Time travel is officially removed in 6.3.  I agree with you that it
ought to have been left in, but the consensus among the developers
seemed to be that it was not worth the effort (and performance hit) to
properly fix and keep it, when it could, as you say, be done at the
user level.

> 3. the PostgreSQL team have picked up the other changes in the
> patches directory (from FreeBSD and NetBSD)

Are there actual changes there that are not merely intended to get the
system to work on these platforms?  Hardware-specific fixes for other
NetBSD platforms than Sparc, VAX and Intel?  PostgreSQL 6.3 works on
both NetBSD and FreeBSD, and one of the central team of developers
uses FreeBSD on his development system (and also has an @FreeBSD.org
email address, for what that's worth).

> 4. have worked out how to do non-ASCII character sets in a sane
> manner.

Not yet.  That is, 8-bit character sets are fine -- PostgreSQL can
handle ISO 8859, and can use locales if you want it to.  Larger sets
are not available, though.  Patches were recently made available by
a contributor, but it was decided that it was too close to a release,
and that this will be worked on after 6.3 is out.

> And Postgres 4.1 used to work on the Alpha fine, albeit under
> Ultrix, I think it was called then - what happened?

I don't know -- but 4.1 is quite a few years ago, and among the things
that have been done is a complete replacement of the query language,
SQL taking the place of PostQUEL.  Right now, 6.3 is known to work on
Alpha Linux, but the fixes are not integrated into the release branch,
and may be extensive enough that this won't happen.

-tih
-- 
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