My attention was drawn to the log_error() stuff in controldata_utils.c by
the fact that buildfarm member pademelon spit up on it. The reason for
that compile failure is that pademelon's dinosaur of a compiler doesn't
support __VA_ARGS__. I do not feel a need to get into a discussion about
whether we should move our portability goalposts for the convenience of
this commit, because there are other reasons why this is a crummy solution
for error reporting:
* It uses elog() not ereport() for what seems a not-particularly-internal
error, which among other things means that an entirely inappropriate
errcode() will be reported.
* It relies on strerror(errno), not %m, which may not work reliably even
in elog() and certainly won't in ereport() (because of order-of-evaluation
uncertainties).
* Translatability of the error message in the frontend context seems
a bit dubious; generally we let translators work with the whole string
to be printed, not just part of it.
* It's randomly unlike every single other place we've addressed the
same problem. Everywhere else in src/common does it like this:
#ifndef FRONTEND ereport(ERROR, (errcode(ERRCODE_PROGRAM_LIMIT_EXCEEDED),
errmsg("outof memory")));
#else fprintf(stderr, _("out of memory\n")); exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
#endif
and I think that's what this needs to do too, especially in view of the
fact that there are only two places that would have to be fixed anyway.
regards, tom lane