mirror of
https://github.com/postgres/postgres.git
synced 2025-08-31 17:02:12 +03:00
The standard way to check for list emptiness is to compare the List pointer to NIL; our list code goes out of its way to ensure that that is the only representation of an empty list. (An acceptable alternative is a plain boolean test for non-null pointer, but explicit mention of NIL is usually preferable.) Various places didn't get that memo and expressed the condition with list_length(), which might not be so bad except that there were such a variety of ways to check it exactly: equal to zero, less than or equal to zero, less than one, yadda yadda. In the name of code readability, let's standardize all those spellings as "list == NIL" or "list != NIL". (There's probably some microscopic efficiency gain too, though few of these look to be at all performance-critical.) A very small number of cases were left as-is because they seemed more consistent with other adjacent list_length tests that way. Peter Smith, with bikeshedding from a number of us Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAHut+PtQYe+ENX5KrONMfugf0q6NHg4hR5dAhqEXEc2eefFeig@mail.gmail.com
# Generating dummy probes If Postgres isn't configured with dtrace enabled, we need to generate dummy probes for the entries in probes.d, that do nothing. This is accomplished in Unix via the sed script `Gen_dummy_probes.sed`. We used to use this in MSVC builds using the perl utility `psed`, which mimicked sed. However, that utility disappeared from Windows perl distributions and so we converted the sed script to a perl script to be used in MSVC builds. We still keep the sed script as the authoritative source for generating these dummy probes because except on Windows perl is not a hard requirement when building from a tarball. So, if you need to change the way dummy probes are generated, first change the sed script, and when it's working generate the perl script. This can be accomplished by using the perl utility s2p. s2p is no longer part of the perl core, so it might not be on your system, but it is available on CPAN and also in many package systems. e.g. on Fedora it can be installed using `cpan App::s2p` or `dnf install perl-App-s2p`. The Makefile contains a recipe for regenerating Gen_dummy_probes.pl, so all you need to do is once you have s2p installed is `make Gen_dummy_probes.pl` Note that in a VPATH build this will generate the file in the vpath tree, not the source tree.