Re: proposal: PL/Pythonu - function ereport - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On Sat, Oct 17, 2015 at 8:18 PM, Pavel Stehule <pavel.stehule@gmail.com> wrote:
> here is new patch
>
> cleaned, all unwanted artefacts removed. I am not sure if used way for
> method registration is 100% valid, but I didn't find any related
> documentation.

Pavel, some notes about the patch, not a full review (yet?).

In PLy_add_exceptions PyDict_New is not checked for failure.

In PLy_spi_error__init__, kw will be NULL if SPIError is called with
no arguments. With the current code NULL will get passed to
PyDict_Size which will generate something like SystemError Bad
internal function call. This also means a test using just SPIError()
is needed.
It seems args should never be NULL by the way, if there are no
arguments it's an empty tuple so the other side of the check is ok.

The current code doesn't build on Python3 because the 3rd argument of
PyMethod_New, the troubled one you need set to NULL has been removed.
This has to do with the distinction between bound and unbound methods
which is gone in Python3.

There is http://bugs.python.org/issue1587 which discusses how to
replace the "third argument" functionality for PyMethod_New in
Python3. One of the messages there links to
http://bugs.python.org/issue1505 and
https://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/429cadbc5b10/ which has an example
very similar to what you're trying to do, rewritten to work in
Python3. But this is still confusing: note that the replaced code
*didn't really use PyMethod_New at all* as the removed line meth =
PyMethod_New(func, NULL, ComError); was commented out and the replaced
code used to simply assign the function to the class dictionary
without even creating a method.
Still, the above link shows a (more verbose but maybe better)
alternative: don't use PyErr_NewException and instead define an
SPIError type with each slot spelled out explicitly. This will remove
the "is it safe to set the third argument to NULL" question.

I tried to answer the "is it safe to use NULL for the third argument
of PyMethod_New in Python2?" question and don't have a definite answer
yet. If you look at the CPython code it's used to set im_class
(Objects/classobject.c) of PyMethodObject which is accessible from
Python.
But this code:
init = plpy.SPIError.__init__
plpy.notice("repr {} str {} im_class {}".format(repr(init), str(init),
init.im_class))
produces:
NOTICE:  repr <unbound method SPIError.__init__> str <unbound method
SPIError.__init__> im_class <class 'plpy.SPIError'>
so the SPIError class name is set in im_class from somewhere. But this
is all moot if you use the explicit SPIError type definition.

>> Any help is welcome

I can work with you on this. I don't have a lot of experience with the
C API but not zero either.