Horton

Re: GUC names in messages

Laurenz Albe <laurenz.albe@cybertec.at>

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From: Laurenz Albe <laurenz.albe@cybertec.at>
To: Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org>, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, Daniel Gustafsson <daniel@yesql.se>
Cc: Peter Smith <smithpb2250@gmail.com>, PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2023-11-01T20:46:52Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers 
On Wed, 2023-11-01 at 16:12 -0400, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> On 01.11.23 10:25, Tom Lane wrote:
> > And there's never been any
> > real clarity about whether to quote GUC names, though certainly we're
> > more likely to quote anything injected with %s.  So that's why we have
> > a mishmash right now.
> 
> I'm leaning toward not quoting GUC names.  The quoting is needed in 
> places where the value can be arbitrary, to avoid potential confusion. 
> But the GUC names are well-known, and we wouldn't add confusing GUC 
> names like "table" or "not found" in the future.

I agree for names with underscores in them.  But I think that quoting
is necessary for names like "timezone" or "datestyle" that might be
mistaken for normal words.  My personal preference is to always quote
GUC names, but I think it is OK not to quote GOCs whose name are
clearly not natural language words.

Yours,
Laurenz Albe

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