[php-maint] Bug#773182: Bug#773182: Problem solved

[Friedhelm Mehnert]

On Tue, Dec 23, 2014 at 08:54:01AM +0100, Thijs Kinkhorst wrote:
> 
> It's quite harsh to tell the volunteers that maintain this package that
> we're "obviously not interested at all" when we did not yet respond within
> only one week after filing the bug...
> 
> Please share your solution and help improve free software. It will be
> processed in due time, if not sooner then certainly later.
> 
> 
> Cheers,
> Thijs


Well, that's how things seem to be these days. By asking nicely one does
not archive anything anymore. Once you get pissed, get unfriendly, and
start anoying people, *then* you'll get an answer! :-)

I'm not a programmer. I do not have the resources, to compile php-5 from
source and try the fixes out.

Anyway, let me try to explain:

I have recently updatet a production-machine from Squeeze-lts to Wheezy.
Squeeze has Postgresql 8.4.

So, after the update, I thougt it would be a good idea to update to the
"Wheezy-Version" Postgresql 9.1 as well. So I did, using the
pg_updatecluster methode as outlined in the README.Debian, which worked
like a charm. Everything was working as expected...

Well nearly everthing. After the upgrade my application could not get
the BLOBs from the database. The files had zero length and were empty.

So I put some debuging code into my application, which showed, that the
pg_lo-export function returned TRUE (success), but produced empty files.

So I purged the new version and restored the old version from backup.

I looked at the documentation, which came with the new version, but did
not find the slitest hint on what might be wrong.

Several days later I found the *course* of the problem within the
online-documentation for Postgresql 9.0!

There it was. BLOBs now have "permissions"! To be able to retrieve them
you have to grant at least "select" permission to the user the
web-browser runs as on each and every single object!

So I upgraded again, picked one BLOB, granted the permission and --
bingo -- it worked! So I had to write a script, to grant the permissions
to all the 700+ BLOBs within my database and things worked again.

So knowning the *cause* of the problem still leaves us with a bug.

The pg_lo_export function returnes TRUE and silently produces unusable
files, if the BLOB lacks the needed permissions. It *should* rather
return FALSE in this case.

I have looked at the source and I *think* line 3504 within the source
file php5-5.4.4/ext/pgsql/pgsql.c which looks now as follows:

   3504         if (lo_export(pgsql, oid, file_out)) {
   3505                 RETURN_TRUE;
   3506         }
   3507         RETURN_FALSE;
   3508 }

should be changed to:

   3504        if (lo_export(pgsql, oid, file_out) == 1) {

I have *not* tested this. Also I can not prove, that the lo_export
function actually returnes -1 in this case, as it should. Furthermore it
is possible, that other functions within the pgsql module have the same
problem.

I hope this lengthy explanation is good enough, so someone who is able
to compile from source and test it can fix this bug.

Best Regards
Friedhelm