Horton

Re: GUC names in messages

Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org>

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From: Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org>
To: Peter Smith <smithpb2250@gmail.com>, Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz>
Cc: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org>, Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>, Laurenz Albe <laurenz.albe@cybertec.at>, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, Daniel Gustafsson <daniel@yesql.se>, PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2023-12-21T13:24:00Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers 
On 21.12.23 07:24, Peter Smith wrote:
> #1. GUC name quoting.
> 
> Some basic guidelines were decided and a patch is already pushed [1].
> 
>     <para>
>      In messages containing configuration variable names, do not include quotes
>      when the names are visibly not natural English words, such as when they
>      have underscores, are all-uppercase or have mixed case. Otherwise, quotes
>      must be added. Do include quotes in a message where an arbitrary variable
>      name is to be expanded.
>     </para>
> 
> AFAIK there is nothing controversial there, although maybe the
> guideline for 'mixed case' needs revisiting depending on objections
> about point #2.

Now that I read this again, I think this is wrong.

We should decide the quoting for a category, not the actual content. 
Like, quote all file names; do not quote keywords.

This led to the attempted patch to decide the quoting of GUC parameter 
names dynamically based on the actual content, which no one really 
liked.  But then, to preserve consistency, we also need to be uniform in 
quoting GUC parameter names where the name is hardcoded.

Commits

  1. Apply GUC name from central table in more places of guc.c

  2. Use camel case for "DateStyle" in some error messages

  3. Unify some error messages to ease work of translators

  4. Apply more quoting to GUC names in messages

  5. Revise GUC names quoting in messages again

  6. doc: Mention how to use quotes with GUC names in error messages

  7. Apply quotes more consistently to GUC names in logs