Re: proposal: rounding up time value less than its unit.

* Robert Haas (robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com) wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 4:49 PM, Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:
> > * Gregory Smith (gregsmithpgsql(at)gmail(dot)com) wrote:
> >> On 9/25/14, 2:02 PM, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> >> >But having the same parameter setting mean different things in
> >> >different versions is the path to complete madness.
> >>
> >> Could we go so far as to remove support for unitless time settings
> >> eventually? The fact that people are setting raw numbers in the
> >> configuration file and have to know the unit to understand what they
> >> just did has never been something I like.
> >
> > I could certainly get behind that idea... Tho I do understand that
> > people will complain about backwards compatibility, etc, etc.
>
> There's also the fact that it doesn't fix the originally complained-of
> problem. It does fix a problem with one of the fixes proposed for
> that original problem, though.

That's certainly an excellent point- this is really orthogonal to the
actual issue of setting a value smaller than a single unit for that
setting. Even if you have units attached to every GUC, an individual
could take a setting which is understaood at the '1 minute' level and
attempt to set it to '30 seconds', for example.

On the other hand, if we're making it an error to set values without
units, I'd again be behind the idea of throwing an error on the
smaller-than-one-unit case- people are going to have to go update their
configurations to deal with the errors from the lack-of-units, this
would just be another item to fix during that process. It'd certainly
be worse to change to require units and then wait anothe release to fix
or change things to address the original complaint.

Thanks,

Stephen