Re: confusing error message

On 08/10/2013 12:09 AM, Stephen Frost wrote:
> Perhaps we should add an area to our documentation which provides
> more information about the specific error messages which PostgreSQL
> returns? That's not a terribly exciting bit of documentation to
> write, but perhaps it would be very useful for our users.

PG00204 Error reading control file

More seriously, with interpolated strings for relation names etc it can
be hard to know which chunks to search for, and search engines aren't
always good at having the whole message thrown at them.

I'm not actually proposing in-text message identifiers ... I'm sure
enough people have ignored all sanity and reason and parsed message
strings that this would cause breakage all over the place. It'd also be
a nightmare for translators and would easily be confused for an SQLSTATE.

A separate field in the structured messages would be saner, but of
course most clients would not then display it so the user would never
know it was there, much the same way few people seem to realise you can
get the function, source file and line from error messages already.
After all, how many people do you think run with VERBOSITY=verbose in psql?

--
Craig Ringer http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services