Re: GUC time unit spelling a bit inconsistent

"Peter Eisentraut" <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> writes:

> I'm pretty sure a lot of people would initially be confused why anyone would
> write time in meters, let alone those that might associate it with memory
> units. In my subjective view (and I acknowledge that we have all been
> educated in different ways), writing "1m" for a time quantity is meaningless
> and an error.

That's an argument for why Postgres maybe shouldn't print times with "m" for
minutes -- though I for one would prefer it. Or why it might not be a
particularly good idea for a sysadmin to use "m" given the choice.

But to argue that Postgres should refuse "m" when presented with it you would
have to say there's a substantial chance that the user didn't mean minutes and
that there was a risk Postgres would do something bad that outweighs giving
users who do want minutes getting what they want.

Frankly, I think I see "m" as an abbreviation for minutes *more* often than
"min" anyways. I see times written as 2h30m quite frequently and then there's
precedent like this:

$ time echo

real 0m0.000s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s

--
Gregory Stark
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com