Re: [PATCH] Cleanup of GUC units code

On Wed, 2008-09-03 at 07:52 -0700, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> Hannu Krosing wrote:
> > On Tue, 2008-09-02 at 16:50 +0300, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> >> Gregory Stark wrote:
> >>> Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> writes:
>
> > Are you really afraid that someone would want to use mb to mean
> > millibits ?
> >
> > As SQL is generally case insensitive, it is quite surprising to most
> > people that GUC units are not.
>
> We have had this discussion before, I even submitted a patch to make
> them case insensitive. In retrospect I was wrong to submit that patch.
> SQL may be case insensitive but units are not. MB != Mb != mb ,

For most people they are equal, and all mean MEGABYTE(S) though
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MB has lots of other possible meanings for
each.

> I don't think we should encourage in any way for users to do the wrong thing.

Can you see any scenario where accepting case insensitive units does
more damage than just ignoring the conf line with "incorrect" casing ?

Or do you mean we should discourage people from editing postgresql.conf
manually and have them use some tool which prevents them entering "kb" ?

----------------
Hannu