Re: GUC time unit spelling a bit inconsistent

Dave Page wrote:
> Michael Paesold wrote:
>> It's not about a certain standard. There are so many different ways in
>> the world to write time units, so in a certain context a standard is
>> really useful to constrain the format/syntax, but...
>>
>> This all was about usability of a configuration file, wasn't it? Now,
>> Peter, you improved that very much with this change. But do you at the
>> same time want to cripple the usefulness again by insisting on a
>> certain _syntax_, while the _semantics_ are completely clear to
>> (guessing) 99% of the people who will changes these settings?
>
> FWIW, I agree entirely.

My 2c on this:

The way I was taught in school is that "min" is for minute and "mon" is
for month. Specifically, not "m".

I just had to download ISO 8601 and it seems irrelevant here. It talks
about using certain characters *in place* of digits, like "hh:mm", and
it talks about time periods, but that syntax is completely different,
like P1H2M, meaning 5 hour and 2 minutes.

A HINT listing the valid units is a reasonable compromise.

--
Heikki Linnakangas
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com