Sketch of extending error handling for subtransactions in functions

Currently, the way that ereport/elog processing works is:

1. Collect up all the error parameter information into an ErrorData
structure.  (This is somewhat nontrivial in itself, at least in the
ereport case, but I'll gloss over that here.)

2. Construct a log message and/or a client Error or Notice message
and send it off to the right places.

3. Discard the ErrorData structure.

4. If severity level < ERROR, return to caller; if = ERROR,
longjmp(Warn_restart) to return control to postgres.c; if > ERROR,
bail out via proc_exit.

This needs some refactoring if we are going to be able to use nested
transactions for trapping errors in functions.  In particular, if
the error is to be trapped then it should not be reported to the client
(and probably not to the log either, though I suppose that might be
debatable).  Also control had better not bounce all the way out to
postgres.c.

What I propose is that we leave the non-ERROR cases (both NOTICE and
FATAL branches) acting as above.  In the ERROR case, though, I think
elog.c should longjmp to Warn_restart just after step 1 is complete,
without having reported the error anywhere.  In the simple case where
there is no error trapping involved, the longjmp will still lead back
to postgres.c, and we will add code there that calls back into elog.c
to print out and release the ErrorData info (ie, steps 2 and 3 get
factored out as subroutines that are called from PostgresMain, instead
of being done directly in errfinish).

To implement error trapping, the PL languages will change Warn_restart
to point at their own handlers whenever a TRY-block is running.
What such a handler would normally do is:* Restore the outer value of Warn_restart.  (This must be  done first, to
avoidinfinite loop if any error happens  in the next steps.)* Save off a copy of whatever information it wants about
theerror.  (Probably we should just provide a function  to copy the whole ErrorData structure out of elog.c's  private
memorycontext.)* Release elog.c's ErrorData structure (step 3 above).  At this point we are out of the critical
error-handling code and able to support a new error.* Roll back to the savepoint that was established at entry to  the
TRYblock.  This cleans up the rest of the backend's  state to finish recovering from the error.* Execute whatever
error-trappingcode the user has provided.  The copied error information would be available for  inspection here.*
Releasethe copied error information when no longer needed.
 

This doesn't seem to require any great amount of new code, just
refactoring of code that exists now.

One issue is that it may break existing PLs that override Warn_restart,
since the semantics of doing that will have changed a bit.  We can
easily fix the PLs that are in our own CVS, but what are the
implications for other PLs such as PL/R and PL/SH?  Joe, Peter, any
comments?

I am somewhat tempted to rename the setjmp variable Warn_restart to
something else, so as to catch any code that is still expecting the
old behavior (besides, it was never a very good name anyway).  On the
other hand, there may be cases where a PL's code doesn't actually need
to change, and if so a rename would just break it unnecessarily.  Any
votes which way to jump?
        regards, tom lane