Re: GUC time unit spelling a bit inconsistent

Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 21, 2007 at 03:24:51PM +0200, Michael Paesold wrote:
>> There are valid reasons against 5m as mega-bytes, because here m does 
>> not refer to a unit, it refers to a quantifier (if that is a reasonable 
>> English word) of a unit. So it should really be 5mb.
>>
>> log_rotation_age = 5m
>> log_rotation_size = 5mb
> 
> Except, of course, that "5mb" would be understood by those of us who
> work in metric and use both bits and bytes as 5 millibits.

I at one point submitted a patch to make units case insensitive, I have 
since submitting that patch decided that was a horrible idea. Why can't 
we use standard units? Mb, Kb, KB, MB... (I don't know the standard unit 
for minutes).

The more I see this going back and forth it seems we should just do it 
right the first time and tell everyone else to read:

The fine manual
The spec(s) that define the units.

Joshua D. Drake




>  Which
> would be an absurd value, but since Postgres had support for time
> travel once, who knows what other wonders the developers have come up
> with ;-)  (I will note, though, that this B vs b problem really gets
> up my nose, especially when I hear people who are ostensibly
> designing networks talking about "gigabyte ethernet" cards.  I would
> _like_ such a card, I confess, but to my knowledge the standard
> hasn't gotten that far yet.)
> 
> Nevertheless, I think that Tom's original suggestion was at least a
> HINT, which seems perfectly reasonable to me.  
> 
> A
> 


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