Chapter 51. PostgreSQL Coding Conventions

Table of Contents
51.1. Formatting
51.2. Reporting Errors Within the Server
51.3. Error Message Style Guide
51.3.1. What goes where
51.3.2. Formatting
51.3.3. Quotation marks
51.3.4. Use of quotes
51.3.5. Grammar and punctuation
51.3.6. Upper case vs. lower case
51.3.7. Avoid passive voice
51.3.8. Present vs past tense
51.3.9. Type of the object
51.3.10. Brackets
51.3.11. Assembling error messages
51.3.12. Reasons for errors
51.3.13. Function names
51.3.14. Tricky words to avoid
51.3.15. Proper spelling
51.3.16. Localization

51.1. Formatting

Source code formatting uses 4 column tab spacing, with tabs preserved (i.e. tabs are not expanded to spaces). Each logical indentation level is one additional tab stop. Layout rules (brace positioning, etc) follow BSD conventions.

While submitted patches do not absolutely have to follow these formatting rules, it's a good idea to do so. Your code will get run through pgindent, so there's no point in making it look nice under some other set of formatting conventions.

For Emacs, add the following (or something similar) to your ~/.emacs initialization file:

;; check for files with a path containing "postgres" or "pgsql"
(setq auto-mode-alist
  (cons '("\\(postgres\\|pgsql\\).*\\.[ch]\\'" . pgsql-c-mode)
        auto-mode-alist))
(setq auto-mode-alist
  (cons '("\\(postgres\\|pgsql\\).*\\.cc\\'" . pgsql-c-mode)
        auto-mode-alist))

(defun pgsql-c-mode ()
  ;; sets up formatting for PostgreSQL C code
  (interactive)
  (c-mode)
  (setq-default tab-width 4)
  (c-set-style "bsd")             ; set c-basic-offset to 4, plus other stuff
  (c-set-offset 'case-label '+)   ; tweak case indent to match PG custom
  (setq indent-tabs-mode t))      ; make sure we keep tabs when indenting

For vi, your ~/.vimrc or equivalent file should contain the following:

set tabstop=4

or equivalently from within vi, try

:set ts=4

The text browsing tools more and less can be invoked as

more -x4
less -x4

to make them show tabs appropriately.