Re: Avoiding inadvertent debugging mode for pgbench

On 3/1/24 23:41, Nathan Bossart wrote:

> 

> I think this is a generally reasonable proposal, except I don't know

> whether this breakage is acceptable.  AFAICT there are two fundamental

> behavior changes folks would observe:

> 

> * "-d <database_name>" would cease to emit the debugging output, and while

>   enabling debug mode might've been unintentional in most cases, it might

>   actually have been intentional in others.

> 

I think this is the more severe of the two issues, because it's a silent

change. Everything will seem to work, but the user won't get the debug

info (if they actually wanted it).

> * "-d" with no argument or with a following option would begin failing, and

>   users would need to replace "-d" with "--debug".

> 

I think this is fine.

> Neither of these seems particularly severe to me, especially for a

> benchmarking program, but I'd be curious to hear what others think.

> 

I agree the -d option may be confusing, but is it worth it? I don't

know, it depends on how often people actually get confused by it, and I

don't recall hitting this (nor hearing about others). To be honest I

didn't even realize pgbench even has a debug switch ...

But I'd like to mention this is far from our only tool using "-d" to

enable debug mode. A quick git-grep shows postgres, initdb,

pg_archivecleanup and pg_combinebackup do the same thing. So maybe it's

not that inconsistent overall.