Re: Inconsistent error message wording for REINDEX CONCURRENTLY

On Tue, May 14, 2019 at 11:32:52AM -0400, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> I do :-)

And actually I am happy to see somebody raising that point. The
current log messages are quite inconsistent for a couple of years now
but I did not bother changing anything other than the new strings per
the feedback I got until, well, yesterday.

> It seems strange to have some cases say "cannot do foo" and other cases
> say "foo is not supported". However, I think having
> ReindexMultipleTables say "cannot reindex a system catalog" would be
> slightly wrong (since we're not reindexing one but many) -- so it would
> have to be "cannot reindex system catalogs". And in order to avoid
> having two messages that are essentially identical except in number, I
> propose to change the others to use the plural too. So the one you just
> committed
>
> would become "cannot reindex system catalogs concurrently", identical to
> the one in ReindexMultipleTables.

There are also a couple of similar, much older, error messages in
index_create() for concurrent creation. Do you think that these
should be changed? I can see benefits for translators to unify things
a bit more, but these do not directly apply to REINDEX, and all
messages are a bit different depending on the context. One argument
to change them is that they don't comply with the project style as
they use full sentences.

Perhaps something like the attached for the REINDEX portion would make
the world a better place? What do you think?
--
Michael