Re: Renaming MemoryContextResetAndDeleteChildren to MemoryContextReset

Hi,

On 2015-02-26 17:01:53 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> We've discussed doing $SUBJECT off and on for nearly ten years,
> the oldest thread I could find about it being here:
> http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/1186435268(dot)16321(dot)37(dot)camel(at)dell(dot)linuxdev(dot)us(dot)dell(dot)com
> It's come up again every time we found another leak of dead child
> contexts, which happened twice last year for example. And that patch
> I'm pushing for "expanded" out-of-line objects really needs this to
> become the default behavior anywhere that we can detoast objects.

I don't object to the behavioural change per se, rather the contrary,
but I find it a pretty bad idea to change the meaning of an existing
functioname this way. Without a compiler erroring out people won't
notice that suddenly MemoryContextReset deletes much more; leading to
possibly hard to find errors. Context resets frequently are in error
paths, and those won't necessarily be hit when running with assertions
enabled.

Greetings,

Andres Freund