Re: GUC names in messages

On Fri, Nov 24, 2023 at 8:53 PM Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org> wrote:
>
> On 2023-Nov-24, Michael Paquier wrote:
>
> > On Thu, Nov 23, 2023 at 06:27:04PM +1100, Peter Smith wrote:
> > > There may be some changes I've missed, but hopefully, this is a nudge
> > > in the right direction.
> >
> > Thanks for spending some time on that.
>
> +1
>
> >     <para>
> > +    In messages containing configuration variable names, do not include quotes
> > +    when the names are visibly not English natural words, such as when they
> > +    have underscores or 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>
> >
> > That seems to describe clearly the consensus reached on the thread
> > (quotes for GUCs that are single terms, no quotes for names that are
> > obviously parameters).
>
> Yeah, this is pretty much the patch I proposed earlier.
>
> > In terms of messages that have predictible names, 0002 moves in the
> > needle in the right direction.  There seem to be more:
> > src/backend/postmaster/bgworker.c:  errhint("Consider increasing the
> > configuration parameter \"max_worker_processes\".")));
> > contrib/pg_prewarm/autoprewarm.c:  errhint("Consider increasing
> > configuration parameter \"max_worker_processes\".")));
>
> Yeah.  Also, these could be changed to have the GUC name outside the
> message proper, which would reduce the total number of messages.  (But
> care must be given to the word "the" there.)
>

 I had posted something similar a few posts back [1], but it just
caused more questions unrelated to GUC name quotes so I abandoned that
temporarily.

So for now, I hope this thread can be only about quotes on GUC names,
otherwise, I thought it may become stuck debating dozens of individual
messages. Certainly later, or in another thread, we can revisit all
messages again to try to identify/extract any "common" ones.

> > Things like parse_and_validate_value() and set_config_option_ext()
> > include log strings about GUC and these use quotes.  Could these areas
> > be made smarter with a routine to check if quotes are applied
> > automatically when we have a "simple" GUC name, aka I guess made of
> > only lower-case characters?  This could be done with a islower() on
> > the string name, for instance.
>
> I think we could leave these improvements for a second round.  They
> don't need to hold back the improvement we already have.
>

I tried something for this already but kept it in a separate patch. See v2-0003

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[1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAHut%2BPv8VG7fvXzg5PNeQuUhJG17xwCWNpZSUUkN11ArV%3D%3DCdg%40mail.gmail.com

Kind Regards,
Peter Smith.
Fujitsu Australia