Chapter 43. PostgreSQL Coding Conventions

Table of Contents
43.1. Formatting
43.2. Reporting Errors Within the Server
43.3. Error Message Style Guide
43.3.1. What goes where
43.3.2. Formatting
43.3.3. Quotation marks
43.3.4. Use of quotes
43.3.5. Grammar and punctuation
43.3.6. Upper case vs. lower case
43.3.7. Avoid passive voice
43.3.8. Present vs past tense
43.3.9. Type of the object
43.3.10. Brackets
43.3.11. Assembling error messages
43.3.12. Reasons for errors
43.3.13. Function names
43.3.14. Tricky words to avoid
43.3.15. Proper spelling
43.3.16. Localization

43.1. 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.