Re: Show various offset arrays for heap WAL records

On Tue, Apr 11, 2023 at 10:34 AM Peter Geoghegan <pg(at)bowt(dot)ie> wrote:
> > description | off: 119, xmax: 1105, flags: 0x00, old_infobits:
> > [], new off: 100, xmax 0
>
> That doesn't seem great to me either. I don't like this ambiguity,
> because it seems like it makes the description hard to parse in a way
> that flies in the face of what we're trying to do here, in general.
> So it seems like it might be worth fixing now, in the scope of this
> patch.

Attached revision deals with this by spelling out the names in full
(e.g., "old_xmax" and "new_xmax"). It also reorders the output fields
to match the order from the physical UPDATE, HOT_UPDATE, and LOCK WAL
record types, on the theory that those should match the physical
record (unless there is a good reason not to, which doesn't apply
here). I also removed some inconsistencies between
xl_heap_lock_updated and xl_heap_lock, since they're very similar
record types.

The revision also adds an extra sentence to the guidelines, since this
seems like something that we're entitled to take a relatively firm
position on. Finally, it also adds a comment about the rules for
infobits_desc callers in header comments for the function, per your
concern about that.

--
Peter Geoghegan