Thread

Re: Uncommented GUC in postgresql.conf.sample

Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> — 2025-11-14T15:20:41Z

On 2025-11-14 Fr 9:06 AM, Daniel Gustafsson wrote:
> When looking at the nearby suggestion to add deprecation comment for md5 in the
> .conf.sample, I happened to notice that autovacuum_worker_slots isn't commented
> out it the sample file.
>
> AFAIK all GUCs in the sample file should be set to their defaults and left
> commented out.  The attached does that for autovacuum_worker_slots and adds a
> trivial test to test_misc to catch it (and modifies the existing test which
> would've caught it). Or is there a case for leaving uncommented?


I don't think so.


+    # Make sure each line starts with either a # or whitespace
+    ok(0, 'missing # in postgresql.conf.sample') if ($line =~ m/^[^#\s]/);


This would probably be better written something like:

# non-blank lines must start with a # as the first non-blank character
unlike($line, qr/^\s*[^#\s]/, 'missing # in postgresql.conf.sample');


This will catch more error cases (e.g. a line that starts with spaces 
and then has a non-#). Also, "ok(0,...)" is a pattern you pretty much 
never want. My formulation will give better diagnostics if the test fails.

OTOH, if you want to skip a lot of ok's in the regress_log file, you can 
do something like:


fail("$line missing initial # in postgresql.conf.sample") if $line =~ 
/^\s*[^#\s]/;



cheers


andrew


--
Andrew Dunstan
EDB:https://www.enterprisedb.com