Bug in date.c

Gregory Stark <stark@enterprisedb.com> writes:

There's a bug in datetime.c when it handles errors converting text into
various date formats. It tries to avoid palloc'ing a cstring copy of the in=
put
by storing it in a stack variable instead but that means it can't handle
inputs over MAXDATELEN. So it throws an error but passes the varlena string
where the format expects a c string. Of course having to generate a c string
for the format begs the question...

Good catch. I'm hoping that all three of these functions will go away
before 8.3 is out (in favor of a generic text cast capability), but we
need a back-patchable fix for the released branches. So the "minimal"
patch looks the best to me --- least risk of patch trouble.

regards, tom lane