Re: Cosmetic change in catalog/index.c

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Neil Conway wrote:
> On the contrary, I can't see any kind of consistency in the leading
> capitalization in elog() messages.

I actually only set out to fix one specific example,
the lowercase 'r' in:

ERROR:  relation named "relation_name" already exists

when trying to create an index. When trying to create a table, sequence,
or view, the message is:

ERROR:  Relation named "relation_name" already exists

so I went with the majority to force a consensus among otherwise identical
error messages. However, I felt silly making a one-letter patch, so made
some other changes in the file as well.

> If you're only going to make a few arbitrary changes but not make things
> consistent, it doesn't seem to be worth the risk of breaking client apps
> that examine error message strings.

Perhaps we need to re-examine error codes? Apps parsing message strings
seems dangerous. On the other hand, I would hope that a simple case change
would not break too many of them. And in the above example, the same error
is already returned two different ways.


Tom Lane writes:
> [consistency] There isn't any :-(.  While I'd vote with Greg to migrate
> towards a consistent use of initial caps, I seem to recall that Peter
> was in favor of no initial caps ... which might help to explain why
> there's no consistency in the code now ...

My argument for initial caps is this: the error codes represent complete
sentences, and look better capitalized. The only exception should be
when an internal lowercase function name begins the error message, such
as:

elog(ERROR, "index_drop: cache lookup failed for index %u",

I am not totally opposed to leading with all lowercase if someone were to
present me with a good argument; more important is to pick one way and
stick with it to avoid problems like the one noted above.

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg@turnstep.com
PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 200302140930

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