Feedback-ID: ia2694551:Fastmail
Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2023 12:04:21 +0100
From: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org>
To: Peter Smith <smithpb2250@gmail.com>
Cc: Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>, 
	Laurenz Albe <laurenz.albe@cybertec.at>, Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org>, 
	Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, Daniel Gustafsson <daniel@yesql.se>, 
	PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: GUC names in messages
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On 2023-Nov-09, Peter Smith wrote:

> Notice that NOT QUOTED is the far more common pattern, so my vote
> would be just to standardise on making everything this way. I know
> there was some concern raised about ambiguous words like "timezone"
> and "datestyle" etc but in practice, those are rare. Also, those GUCs
> are different in that they are written as camel-case (e.g.
> "DateStyle") in the guc_tables.c, so if they were also written
> camel-case in the messages that could remove ambiguities with normal
> words. YMMV.

Well, I think camel-casing is also a sufficient differentiator for these
identifiers not being English words.  We'd need to ensure they're always
written that way, when not quoted.  However, in cases where arbitrary
values are expanded, I don't know that they would be expanded that way,
so I would still go for quoting in that case.

There's also a few that are not camel-cased nor have any underscores --
looking at postgresql.conf.sample, we have "port", "bonjour", "ssl",
"fsync", "geqo", "jit", "autovacuum", "xmlbinary", "xmloption".  (We also
have "include", but I doubt that's ever used in an error message).  But
actually, there's more: every reloption is a candidate, and there we
have "fillfactor", "autosummarize", "fastupdate", "buffering".  So if we
want to make generic advice on how to deal with option names in error
messages, I think the wording on conditional quoting I proposed should
go in (adding CamelCase as a reason not to quote), and then we can fix
the code to match.  Looking at your list, I think the changes to make
are not too numerous.

-- 
Álvaro Herrera               48°01'N 7°57'E  —  https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/
"Nadie está tan esclavizado como el que se cree libre no siéndolo" (Goethe)