Re: Issue in postgres_fdw causing unnecessary wait for cancel request reply - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On Fri, Apr 14, 2023 at 3:19 AM Fujii Masao <masao.fujii@oss.nttdata.com> wrote:
> On 2023/04/13 15:13, Etsuro Fujita wrote:
> > I am not 100% sure that it is a good idea to use the same error
> > message "could not send cancel request" for the PQgetCancel() and
> > PQcancel() cases, because they are different functions.  How about
> > "could not create PGcancel structure” or something like that, for the
>
> The primary message basically should avoid reference to implementation details such as specific structure names like
PGcancel,shouldn't it, as per the error message style guide? 

I do not think that PGcancel is that specific, as it is described in
the user-facing documentation [1].  (In addition, the error message I
proposed was created by copying the existing error message "could not
create OpenSSL BIO structure" in contrib/sslinfo.c.)

> > former case, so we can distinguish the former error from the latter?
>
> Although the primary message is the same, the supplemental message provides additional context that can help
distinguishwhich function is reporting the message. 

If the user is familiar with the PQgetCancel/PQcancel internals, this
is true, but if not, I do not think this is always true.  Consider
this error message, for example:

2023-04-14 17:48:55.862 JST [24344] WARNING:  could not send cancel
request: invalid integer value "99999999999" for connection option
"keepalives"

It would be hard for users without the knowledge about those internals
to distinguish that from this message.  For average users, I think it
would be good to use a more distinguishable error message.

Best regards,
Etsuro Fujita

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/libpq-cancel.html