On Fri, Dec 8, 2023 at 1:34 PM Andres Freund <and...@anarazel.de> wrote: > Oh, very much agreed. But I suspect we won't quickly do the same for > out-of-core extensions...
I feel like this is a problem that will sort itself out just fine. The rules about using ereport() and elog() could probably be better documented than they are, but doing that won't cause people to follow the practices any more rigorously than they have been. However, a change like this just might. If we make this policy change in core, then extension authors will probably get pressure from users to clean up any calls that are emitting excessively verbose log output, and that seems like a good thing. It's impossible to make an omelet without breaking some eggs, but the thing we're talking about here is, IMHO, extremely important. Users are forever hitting weird errors in production that aren't easy to reproduce on test systems, and because most elog() calls are written with the expectation that they won't be hit, they often contain minimal information, which IME makes it really difficult to understand what went wrong. A lot of these are things like - oh, this function expected a valid value of some sort, say a relkind, and it got some nonsense value, say a zero byte. But where did that nonsense value originate? That elog message can't tell you that, but a stack trace will. The last change we made in this area that, at least for me, massively improved debuggability was the change to log the current query string when a backend crashes. That's such a huge help; I can't imagine going back to the old way where you had basically no idea what made things go boom. I think doing something like this can have a similarly positive impact. It is going to take some work - from us and from extension authors - to tidy things up so that it doesn't produce a bunch of unwanted output, but the payoff will be the ability to actually find and fix the bugs instead of just saying to a customer "hey, sucks that you hit a bug, let us know if you find a reproducer." -- Robert Haas EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
