b22527f29d
These functions should return SETOF TEXT[], like the core functions they are wrappers for; but they were incorrectly declared as returning just TEXT[]. This mistake had two results: first, if there was no match you got a scalar null result, whereas what you should get is an empty set (zero rows). Second, the 'g' flag was effectively ignored, since you would get only one result array even if there were multiple matches, as reported by Jeff Certain. While ignoring 'g' is a clear bug, the behavior for no matches might well have been thought to be the intended behavior by people who hadn't compared it carefully to the core regexp_matches() functions. So we should tread carefully about introducing this change in the back branches. Still, it clearly is a bug and so providing some fix is desirable. After discussion, the conclusion was to introduce the change in a 1.1 version of the citext extension (as we would need to do anyway); 1.0 still contains the incorrect behavior. 1.1 is the default and only available version in HEAD, but it is optional in the back branches, where 1.0 remains the default version. People wishing to adopt the fix in back branches will need to explicitly do ALTER EXTENSION citext UPDATE TO '1.1'. (I also provided a downgrade script in the back branches, so people could go back to 1.0 if necessary.) This should be called out as an incompatible change in the 9.5 release notes, although we'll also document it in the next set of back-branch release notes. The notes should mention that any views or rules that use citext's regexp_matches() functions will need to be dropped before upgrading to 1.1, and then recreated again afterwards. Back-patch to 9.1. The bug goes all the way back to citext's introduction in 8.4, but pre-9.1 there is no extension mechanism with which to manage the change. Given the lack of previous complaints it seems unnecessary to change this behavior in 9.0, anyway.
The PostgreSQL contrib tree
---------------------------
This subtree contains porting tools, analysis utilities, and plug-in
features that are not part of the core PostgreSQL system, mainly
because they address a limited audience or are too experimental to be
part of the main source tree. This does not preclude their
usefulness.
User documentation for each module appears in the main SGML
documentation.
When building from the source distribution, these modules are not
built automatically, unless you build the "world" target. You can
also build and install them all by running "make all" and "make
install" in this directory; or to build and install just one selected
module, do the same in that module's subdirectory.
Some directories supply new user-defined functions, operators, or
types. To make use of one of these modules, after you have installed
the code you need to register the new SQL objects in the database
system by executing a CREATE EXTENSION command. In a fresh database,
you can simply do
CREATE EXTENSION module_name;
See the PostgreSQL documentation for more information about this
procedure.