Hi, On 2023-08-11 11:56:27 -0700, Peter Geoghegan wrote: > On Fri, Aug 11, 2023 at 11:23 AM Andres Freund <and...@anarazel.de> wrote: > > > Couldn't you say the same thing about defensive "can't happen" ERRORs? > > > They are essentially a form of assertion that isn't limited to > > > assert-enabled builds. > > > > Yes. A lot of them I hate them with the passion of a thousand suns ;). "Oh, > > our transaction state machinery is confused. Yes, let's just continue going > > through the same machinery again, that'll resolve it.". > > I am not unsympathetic to Ashutosh's point about conventional ERRORs > being easier to deal with when debugging your own code, during initial > development work.
Oh, I am as well - I just don't think it's a good idea to introduce "log + error" assertions to core postgres, because it seems very likely that they'll end up getting used a lot. > But that seems like a problem with the tooling in other areas. Agreed. > For example, dealing with core dumps left behind by the regression > tests can be annoying. Hm. I don't have a significant problem with that. But I can see it being problematic. Unfortunately, short of preventing core dumps from happening, I don't think we really can do much about that - whatever is running the tests shouldn't have privileges to change system wide settings about where core dumps end up etc. > Don't you also hate it when there's a regression.diffs that just shows 20k > lines of subtractions? Perhaps you don't -- perhaps your custom setup makes > it quick and easy to get relevant information about what actually went > wrong. I do really hate that. At the very least we should switch to using restart-after-crash by default, and not start new tests once the server has crashed and do a waitpid(postmaster, WNOHANG) after each failing test, to see if the reason the test failed is that the backend died. > But it seems like that sort of thing could be easier to deal with by > default, without using custom shell scripts or anything -- particularly for > those of us that haven't been Postgres hackers for eons. Yes, wholeheartedly agreed. Greetings, Andres Freund
