Re: tablecmds: clarify recurse vs recusing

On Jan 20, 2026, at 00:14, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:

Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org> 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