Re: Frontend error logging style

Peter Eisentraut <peter(dot)eisentraut(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
> This patch already illustrates a couple of things that are wrong with
> this approach:

All of these objections are a bit moot with my followup proposal, no?

> - It doesn't allow any other way of exiting. For example, in pg_dump,
> you have removed a few exit_nicely() calls. It's not clear why that is
> valid or whether it would always be valid for all call sites.

As the patch stood, I'd hacked it so that pg_log_fatal called
exit_nicely() not exit() within pg_dump. I agree that's not a great
solution, but I think that the correct fix is to get rid of exit_nicely
in favor of doing the requisite cleanup in an atexit hook. pg_dump
is already at great hazard of somebody calling exit() not exit_nicely(),
either through failure to pay attention to that undocumented convention,
or because some code it imports from someplace like src/common calls
exit() directly. You need not look any further than pg_malloc()
to see that there are live problems there.

I figured this could be addressed in a separate patch, though,
because to the extent that missing the exit-nicely callbacks is
a real bug, it's already a bug.

> My suggestion is to just get rid of pg_log_fatal() and replace them all
> with pg_log_error().

I'm on board with dropping the separate FATAL log level if there's
consensus to do so; I think it adds more confusion than anything else.
I still want to have something like pg_fatal(), though, because it's
impossible to deny the usefulness of such an abbreviation. It's already
been reinvented three or four times independently.

Independently of either of those points, I still want to make the changes
I proposed w.r.t. making explicit concepts of "detail" and "hint"
addendums. What we have right now in the frontend code is an impossible
mishmash of three or four ways of filling that lack, all inconsistent.

regards, tom lane