Re: tablecmds: clarify recurse vs recusing

Chao Li <li.evan.chao@gmail.com>

From: Chao Li <li.evan.chao@gmail.com>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org>, Postgres hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2026-05-28T09:26:55Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers

Attachments


> On Jan 21, 2026, at 06:55, Chao Li <li.evan.chao@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On Jan 21, 2026, at 04:07, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> 
>> Chao Li <li.evan.chao@gmail.com> writes:
>>> Enhancing the header comments also helps here.
>>> PSA v2:
>> 
>> I had something more like the attached in mind.  I'm not generally
>> a fan of documenting only some of the arguments of a function, so
>> I don't care for the way you handled the issue for other functions
>> in tablecmds.c either.  We can either assume that people read
>> ATPrepCmd's comment and can extrapolate to the other functions,
>> or we can do something similar to this for all of them.
> 
> Got it, thanks. In v4, I’ve limited the changes to fully documenting all ATPrepCmd() arguments in its header comment and removed the scattered recurse/recursing references from other functions.
> 
>> 
>> I do agree with your 0002, but I see no point in pushing that
>> separately.
> 
> Absolutely. 0002 was too trivial to be a separate commit. I have squashed it into 0001 in v4.
> 
> Best regards,
> --
> Chao Li (Evan)
> HighGo Software Co., Ltd.
> https://www.highgo.com/
> 
> 
> 
> 
> <v4-0001-tablecmds-clarify-recurse-recursing-semantics-in-.patch>

Trying to bump this patch because, while working on patch [1], I needed to think about the meaning of “recurse” and “recursing”. That reminded me of this patch, and it helped me recall the distinction. So I still think this pure comment update patch is still helpful.

Attached v5 is just a rebased version, with no changes from v4.

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/E74C57FA-1DD0-4C8E-8FB1-538034752592%40gmail.com

Best regards,
--
Chao Li (Evan)
HighGo Software Co., Ltd.
https://www.highgo.com/