Re: [PATCH] Change "checkpoint starting" message to use "wal"

Greetings,

* Alvaro Herrera (alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com) wrote:
> On 2018-Nov-29, Robert Haas wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 29, 2018 at 4:10 AM Michael Paquier <michael(at)paquier(dot)xyz> wrote:
> > > On Thu, Nov 29, 2018 at 10:04:12AM +0100, Christoph Berg wrote:
> > > > There's hundreds of other internal uses of xlog that were not touched
> > > > either, only the user-facing parts were changed.
> > >
> > > I have heard of them ;)
> > > Just wondering if this one is worth renaming as the variable is
> > > isolated. It is not a big deal to do nothing though.
> >
> > Well, if we rename the user-visible part but not the internal part,
> > then they don't match, which is odd.
>
> But we already did that when we renamed all the xlog to WAL terminology
> ... why do we care about it now particularly?

I thought the idea was that we'd adjust things in the actual code as
that code was refactored or adjusted for other reasons, to minimize the
back-patching pain. That said, in this particular case that would mean
just changing one variable when the other related ones aren't changed
and I suspect that might just be more confusing than having this
difference between the code and the user-messages.

So, at least in this instance, my feeling is that we keep the variable
as-is and just adjust the user message. When, down the road, there's a
larger refactoring or change in this part of the code, that would be the
time to change the code to refer to WAL instead of XLOG.

Thanks!

Stephen