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.
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 .
Not sure there's much we can do without changing ereport's "signature" though :(