Gurjeet Singh <singh.gurjeet@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 12:11 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> Gurjeet Singh <singh.gurjeet@xxxxxxxxx> writes: >>> Is there a reason why Postgres chose to not use all lowercase characters >>> for these parameters' names. >> It's historical, for sure. I think we've discussed changing them and >> decided it would be more likely to break things than improve matters. > Can we develop aliases to these parameters, that adhere to the standard. > Next release we can mark the old ones as deprecated and a few releases down > the line completely remove the non-stsandard names and rest easy. > Would be happy to contribute such a patch. I think it'd be trivial. Sure, breaking things is trivial. *Not* breaking things requires hard decisions. In this case, I don't see that a small improvement in consistency is worth the side-effects it's likely to have on applications. In particular, I don't believe we could ever remove the aliases, and even if we did have aliases that doesn't fix the problem of applications expecting the names to display in a particular way. That's not a hypothetical problem either. The names of these three settings are effectively part of the wire protocol, since the backend automatically generates ParameterStatus messages for them. At the very least we'd have to generate duplicate ParameterStatus messages for them for the foreseeable future, which imposes a real communication cost (to say nothing of whatever violence you'd have to do to the guc.c code to make it happen). We have made this sort of change before (eg, sort_mem => work_mem), but only with substantially more reason to do it than this, and for settings that applications are substantially less likely to request the values of. regards, tom lane -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
