On Thu, Sep 04, 2008 at 01:26:44AM +0300, Hannu Krosing wrote: > So Andrews opinion was that Mb (meaning Mbit) is different from MB (for > megabyte) and that if someone thinks that we define shared buffers in > megabits can get confused and order wrong kind of network card ?
I know it's fun to point and laugh instead of giving an argument, but the above is not what I said. What I said is that there is a technical difference between at least some of these units, and one that is relevant in some contexts where we have good reason to believe Postgres is used. So it seems to me that there is at least a _prima facie_ reason in favour of making case-based decisions. Your argument against that appears to be, "Well, people can be sloppy." Alvaro's suggestion seems to me to be a better one. It is customary, in servers with large complicated configuration systems, for the server to come with a tool that validates the configuration file before you try to load it. Postfix does this; apache does it; so does BIND. Heck, even NSD (which is way less configurable than BIND) does this. Offering such a tool provides considerable more benefit than the questionable one of allowing people to type whatever they want into the configuration file and suppose that the server will by magic know what they meant. > I can understand Alvaros stance more readily - if we have irrational > constraints on what can go into conf file, and people wont listen to > reason Extending your current reasoning, it's irrational that all the names of the parameters have to be spelled correctly. Why can't we just accept log_statement_duration_min? It's _obvious_ that it's the same thing as log_min_duration_statement! It's silly to expect that harried administrators have to spell these options correctly. Why can't we parse all the file, separating each label by "_". Then if any arrangements of those labels matches a "real" configuration parameter, select that one as the thing to match and proceed from there? A -- Andrew Sullivan [EMAIL PROTECTED] +1 503 667 4564 x104 http://www.commandprompt.com/ -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers