Re: Our naming of wait events is a disaster.

Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> On Tue, 12 May 2020 at 19:11, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> Anyway, I was just throwing this idea out to see if there would be
>> howls of "you can't rename anything" anguish. Since there haven't
>> been so far, I'll spend a bit more time and try to create a concrete
>> list of possible changes.

> If we add in extensions and lwlocks, will they show up as well?

Yeah, I was just looking into that. Part of the reason for the
inconsistency is that we've exposed names that are passed to,
eg, SimpleLruInit that previously were strictly internal debugging
identifiers, so that approximately zero thought was put into them.

We're going to have to document SimpleLruInit and similar functions
along the lines of "The name you give here will be user-visible as
a wait event. Choose it with an eye to consistency with existing
wait event names, and add it to the user-facing documentation."
But that requirement isn't something I just invented, it was
effectively created by whoever implemented things this way.

Said user-facing documentation largely fails to explain that the
set of wait events can be enlarged by extensions; that needs to
be fixed, too.

There isn't a lot we can do to force extensions to pick consistent
names, but on the other hand we won't be documenting such names
anyway, so for my immediate purposes it doesn't matter ;-)

regards, tom lane