Re: Local partitioned indexes and pageinspect

On Mon, Apr 30, 2018 at 2:50 AM, Michael Paquier <michael(at)paquier(dot)xyz> wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 29, 2018 at 06:20:02PM -0700, Peter Geoghegan wrote:
>> What about amcheck? I did change the example query in the docs to
>> account for this, so anyone that generalizes from that won't have a
>> problem, but it would be nice if it had a friendlier message. I didn't
>> change amcheck to account for this myself because I thought it was
>> possible that somebody else would want to use a more general solution.
>
> Perhaps it would help if an errhint is added which is written as "This
> relation is a %s", where %s is a relkind converted to a translatable
> string describing the kind? All those modules work on different objects
> and have different goals and prospoectives, so it looks difficult to me
> to come up with a sane API which is rather portable across modules.

That's probably going to cause some translation problems. The form of
"a" that you need will vary: "a" vs. "an" in English, "un" vs. "una"
in Spanish, etc. And it wouldn't be surprising if there are problems
in some languages even if you make it "This relation is %s". There's
a reason why the documentation advises against building up
translatable strings from constituent parts. If we go this route,
it's probably best to separately translate "This relation is a
table.", "This relation is an index.", etc.

However, backing up a minute, I don't think "relation \"%s\" is not a
btree index" is such a terrible message. These modules are intended
to be intended by people who Know What They Are Doing. If we do want
to change the message, I submit that the only thing that makes it a
little unclear is that a user might fail to realize that a partitioned
index is not an index. But that could be fixed just by adding a
separate message for that one case (index \"%s\" is partitioned) and
sticking with the existing message for other cases.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
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