Re: Raising the checkpoint_timeout limit

On Mon, Feb 1, 2016 at 8:16 PM, Noah Misch <noah@leadboat.com> wrote:
>> I'm not sure what'd actually be a good upper limit. I'd be inclined to
>> even go to as high as a week or so. A lot of our settings have
>> upper/lower limits that aren't a good idea in general.
>
> In general, I favor having limits reflect fundamental system limitations
> rather than paternalism.  Therefore, I would allow INT_MAX (68 years).

I agree. I'm in favor of having things be what is sometimes called
foolproof, but I think that you can only take that so far, and it's
mostly a matter of guiding a more or less reasonable user in the right
direction. Making it easy to do the right thing and hard to do the
wrong thing.

I don't think you can effectively design anything around a user that
makes perversely bad decision at every turn. If you investigate why a
user made a bad decision, there will usually be a chain of faulty but
not outrageous reasoning behind it.

-- 
Peter Geoghegan