Re: Make postmaster environment dump easier to skim over

On 26.11.24 17:55, Andres Freund wrote:
> I think the dump is occasionally useful, so I don't think the best course is
> to remove it entirely. But I think we could fairly easily improve the
> situation by emitting all environment variables as a single elog message.
>
> 2024-11-26 11:35:58.877 EST [1097572][postmaster][:0][] DEBUG: 00000: postgres: PostmasterMain: initial environment dump:
> SHELL=/bin/bash
> ...
> DISPLAY=:0
> SHLVL=1
> ...
> LC_TIME=C
> 2024-11-26 11:35:58.877 EST [1097572][postmaster][:0][] LOCATION: PostmasterMain, postmaster.c:879
>
> is - IMNSHO - a heck of a lot more skimmable.
>
>
> In the attached patch I chose to omit the "-----------------------------------------"
> that we previously emmitted. IMO they're not really needed anymore now that
> this is emitted as one message.

Yes, that makes a lot of sense.

> I'm not sure why the message includes "progname" and
> PostmasterMain. Particularly the latter seems redundant with the elog
> infrastructure today, the message is quite old (an elog since a033daf56639 in
> 2002 and an fprintf in the current location since ebb0a2014930, in 2000). But
> I didn't touch that for now.

Yes, that looks like an unnecessary leftover. Let's just remove it.