Re: GUC names in messages

On Wed, 2023-11-01 at 16:12 -0400, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> On 01.11.23 10:25, Tom Lane wrote:
> > And there's never been any
> > real clarity about whether to quote GUC names, though certainly we're
> > more likely to quote anything injected with %s.  So that's why we have
> > a mishmash right now.
>
> I'm leaning toward not quoting GUC names.  The quoting is needed in
> places where the value can be arbitrary, to avoid potential confusion.
> But the GUC names are well-known, and we wouldn't add confusing GUC
> names like "table" or "not found" in the future.

I agree for names with underscores in them.  But I think that quoting
is necessary for names like "timezone" or "datestyle" that might be
mistaken for normal words.  My personal preference is to always quote
GUC names, but I think it is OK not to quote GOCs whose name are
clearly not natural language words.

Yours,
Laurenz Albe