Re: StringInfo fixes, v19 edition. Plus a few oddities

On Sun, 12 Apr 2026 at 06:42, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>
> David Rowley <dgrowleyml(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > append_tuple_value_detail() contains some pretty weird translation
> > strings. The code currently does:
>
> > /* translator: This is the terminator of a conflict message */
> > appendStringInfoString(buf, _("."));
>
> > I'm not a translator, but isn't that going to be pretty hard to know
> > what to do with, given that the same string could be used for anything
> > else in the code and need something completely different done? That
> > same function also contains a _(": ") and _(", ") which seem equally
> > hard to deal with.
>
> Yeah, this seems to me to fly in the face of our style guide's
> rule about "don't construct messages out of parts". And the
> reason for the rule is precisely that stuff like this poses
> insoluble problems for translators.
>
> I think it'd be reasonable to make this helper function build
> a string like
> (value, value, value)
> with the punctuation being untranslated on the grounds that this
> is standard SQL notation. Then that could be plugged into a
> translatable message that might hopefully represent a full sentence
> with a %s for the tuple data.

I've updated the code to avoid constructing messages from translated
fragments. append_tuple_value_detail() now only builds a SQL-style
tuple string like (v1, v2, v3) without any translation or punctuation.
All punctuation and sentence construction are moved to the callers,
which now use a single translatable string with a %s placeholder for
the tuple data.
Attached patch has the changes for the same.

Regards,
Vignesh