Re: tablecmds: clarify recurse vs recusing - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Tom Lane
Subject Re: tablecmds: clarify recurse vs recusing
Date
Msg-id 1078495.1768839280@sss.pgh.pa.us
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: tablecmds: clarify recurse vs recusing  (Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org>)
Responses Re: tablecmds: clarify recurse vs recusing
List pgsql-hackers
Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org> writes:
> On 19.01.26 08:14, Chao Li wrote:
>> Many ALTER TABLE-related functions take two boolean parameters, 
>> "recurse" and "recursing", whose names are easy to confuse.

> I'm not bothered by this.

>> To reduce this confusion, I’m proposing to rename "recurse" to 
>> "no_only", which more directly reflects its meaning.

> This seems worse.  Especially since no_only is almost a double negative.

Yeah, I don't find this change an improvement either.  I think the
actual problem here is lack of documentation: unlike many other
places, there is next to zero commentary in tablecmds.c about what
all the function parameters are.  It would probably help to define
these, along the lines of

 *  recurse: true if we should recurse to children of this table
 *  recursing: true if we are already recursing from some parent table

If we fleshed out the header comment for ATPrepCmd and maybe a few
other key functions along these lines, that would make the logic
a good deal more intelligible, I think.

            regards, tom lane



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