Re: att_isnull

On Fri, May 10, 2019 at 10:46 AM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> > Yeah, I've noticed this inconsistency too. I doubt we want to change
> > the macro definition or its name, but +1 for expanding the comment.
> > Your proposed wording seems sufficient.
>
> +1

OK, committed. I assume nobody is going to complain that such changes
are off-limits during feature freeze, but maybe I'll be unpleasantly
surprised.

> > I remember being bit by this inconsistency while fixing data corruption
> > problems, but I'm not sure what, if anything, should we do about it.
> > Maybe there's a perfect spot where to add some further documentation
> > about it (a code comment somewhere?) but I don't know where would that
> > be.
>
> It is documented in the "Database Physical Storage" part of the docs,
> but no particular emphasis is laid on the 1-vs-0 convention. Maybe
> a few more words there are worthwhile?

To me it seems like we more need to emphasize it in the code comments,
but I have no concrete proposal. I don't think this is an urgent
problem that needs to consume a lot of cycles right now, but I thought
it was worth mentioning for the archives and just to get the idea out
there that maybe we could do better someday.

(My first idea was to deadpan a proposal that we reverse the
convention, but then I realized that trolling the list might not be my
best strategy.)

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company