On Thu, 03 Jul 2025 at 10:19, Álvaro Herrera <alvhe...@kurilemu.de> wrote: > On 2025-Jul-03, Michael Paquier wrote: > >> Yep. If you do not want this new policy to be forgotten by new paths, >> I'd suggested to standarize that with something like that, close to >> the existing LSN_FORMAT_ARGS(): >> #define LSN_FORMAT "%X/%08X" > > Well, the reason we didn't use a macro in the format string is that > translatability suffers quite a bit, and it's quite annoying. You can > still use it in strings that aren't going to be translated -- for > instance in all the xlog *_desc routines, in elog(), errmsg_internal(), > errdetail_internal(). But for translatable messages such as errmsg(), > errdetail, it's going to break. For example, one particular message in > twophase.c was originally > > msgid "could not read two-phase state from WAL at %X/%X" > > after this patch, it becomes > > msgid "could not read two-phase state from WAL at " > > which is obviously broken. (You can test this by running "make > update-po" and looking at the src/backend/po/*.po.new files. No idea > hwo to do this under Meson, it doesn't seem documented.) >
You're right; I overlooked it. > Eyeballing the patch I think a majority of the messages are not > translatable, so I'm still okay with adding and using the macro. But we > need a revision to go back to literal %X/%08X in errmsg(), errdetail(), > report_invalid_record(). I'd also add a comment next to the macro > indicating that the macro MUST NOT be used for translatable strings, as > it otherwise results in a bug that's only visible if you're running a > version in a language other than English. I bet we're still going to > get hackers use it badly, but not often. > Providing two LSN formats — %X%08X for translatable messages and LSN_FORMAT for non-translatable ones — seems to offer no clear advantage. I'd prefer to use %X/%08X directly and add the description to the LSN_FORMAT_ARGS macro. > The GNU gettext manual suggests you can print the value to a string > variable and then use %s to include that in the translatable string, but > I doubt that's an improvement over just using %X/%08X directly. > Bottom of this page here: > https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/No-string-concatenation.html > Yes, I don't consider that an improvement. -- Regards, Japin Li
