Re: invalid search_path complaints

Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 5:20 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> I am not sure whether we should consider back-patching this into 9.1,
>> although that would be necessary if we wanted to fix Robert's original
>> complaint against 9.1.  Thoughts?

> I guess my feeling would be "no", because it seems like a clear
> behavior change, even though I agree the new behavior's better.  Since
> my original investigation was prompted by a customer complaint, it's
> tempting to say we should, but there's not much good making customer A
> happy if we make customer B unhappy with the same change.

Well, although it's a behavior change, it consists entirely of removing
an error check.  To suppose that this would break somebody's app,
you'd have to suppose that they were relying on "SET search_path =
no_such_schema" to throw an error.  That's possible I guess, but it
seems significantly less likely than that somebody would be expecting
the ALTER ... SET case to not result in warnings.  There are
considerably cheaper and easier-to-use methods for checking whether a
schema exists than catching an error.

Anyway, if you're happy with 9.1 being an outlier on this behavior,
I won't press the point.
        regards, tom lane