commit vs rollback on $dbh->{AutoCommit} = 1 ?

[Tim Bunce]

In his announcement for DBD::Ingres-0.51 Henrik says:

> The DBI docs state that swtiching the value of $dbh->{AutoCommit} from off
> to on should cause a $dbh->commit to be called, but setting
> $dbh->{ing_rollback} to on will cause a $dbh->rollback to be called instead.
> 
> This is mainly usefull in situations where you normally have
> $dbh->{AutoCommit}=1 and only in some subroutines change it to
> $dbh->{AutoCommit}=0 using
>    local $dbh->{AutoCommit}=0;
> to get it reverted to normal use no matter how you leave the subroutine.
> In these cases it seems much more sensible to rollback any uncommited
> transactions on resetting AutCommit than to have them commited.

That seems like a very valid point to me. Commits should always be
explicit not implicit. As it stands now this is very unsafe:

        $dbh->{RaiseError} = 1;
        eval {
            local $dbh->{AutoCommit} = 0;
            ...
        }
        
What to others think of this issue? (Please ignoring for the moment
any backwards compatibility issues with changing this and focus on the
principle.)

Tim.