Re: Better error messages for %TYPE and %ROWTYPE in plpgsql

On Mon, Feb 26, 2024 at 6:54 PM Andy Fan <zhihuifan1213(at)163(dot)com> wrote:

>
> "David G. Johnston" <david(dot)g(dot)johnston(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>
> > On Mon, Feb 26, 2024 at 5:46 PM Andy Fan <zhihuifan1213(at)163(dot)com> wrote:
> >
> > > Per recent discussion[1], plpgsql returns fairly unhelpful "syntax
> > > error" messages when a %TYPE or %ROWTYPE construct references a
> > > nonexistent object. Here's a quick little finger exercise to try
> > > to improve that.
> >
> > Looks this modify the error message, I want to know how ould we treat
> > error-message-compatible issue during minor / major upgrade.
> >
> > There is no bug here so no back-patch; and we are not yet past feature
> freeze for v17.
>
> Acutally I didn't asked about back-patch.

What else should I be understanding when you write the words "minor
upgrade"?

> So if the error message is changed, the above code may be broken.
>
>
A fair point to bring up, and is change-specific. User-facing error
messages should be informative and where they are not changing them is
reasonable. Runtime errors probably need more restraint since they are
more likely to be in a production monitoring alerting system but anything
that is reporting what amounts to a syntax error should be reasonable to
change and not expect people to be writing production code looking for
them. This seems to fall firmly into the "badly written code"/syntax
category.

David J.