Re: Missing errcode() in ereport

Hi,

On 2020-03-30 11:54:03 +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
> On Fri, 20 Mar 2020, 01:59 Andres Freund, <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> wrote:
> > On 2020-03-17 10:09:18 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> > > We might want to spend some effort thinking how to find or prevent
> > > additional bugs of the same ilk ...
> >
> > Yea, that'd be good. Trying to help people new to postgres write their
> > first patches I found that ereport is very confusing to them - largely
> > because the syntax doesn't make much sense. Made worse by the compiler
> > error messages being terrible in many cases.
>
>
> Very much agreed.
>
> I'd have found it helpful to just have the docs explain clearly how it
> works by chaining the comma operator using functions with ignored return
> values.

IDK, that seems like it'll be a bit too implementation specific.

> That would also help people understand how they can make parts of an
> ereport conditional, e.g. only set errdetail() if there additional info is
> currently available W/O duplicating the rest of the ereport .

Well, they can do whatever they can in any function argument list. I
don't see why the ereport docs are a good place to explain ... ? ... :
... ? Or am I misunderstanding what you suggest here?

> Not sure there's much we can do without changing ereport's "signature"

I think the changes we just did already improved the situation a good
bit. Both by obviating the need for the additional parentheses, as well
as making parameters outside of err*() trigger warnings, and also
generally better error/warning messages.

I still think we might want to do a bigger change of the logging
APIs. See the messages leading up to
https://postgr.es/m/20190805214952.dmnn2oetdquixpp4%40alap3.anarazel.de
and the message linked from there.

Greetings,

Andres Freund