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From: Tom Lane <[email protected]>
To: Peter Eisentraut <[email protected]>
Cc: Chao Li <[email protected]>
Cc: Postgres hackers <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: tablecmds: clarify recurse vs recusing
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2026 11:14:40 -0500
Message-ID: <[email protected]> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
References: <CAEoWx2n9E6_zxPbqwMpaPuC1C_p4b3y635SjiDuCPSVm8GBjsA@mail.gmail.com>
	<[email protected]>

Peter Eisentraut <[email protected]> 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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