Re: GUC names in messages

On Mon, Nov 27, 2023 at 01:35:44AM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Laurenz Albe <laurenz.albe@cybertec.at> writes:
> > On Mon, 2023-11-27 at 13:41 +1100, Peter Smith wrote:
>>> In the documentation and in the guc_tables.c they are all described in
>>> MixedCase (e.g. "DateStyle" instead of "datestyle"), so I felt the
>>> messages should use the same case the documentation, which is why I
>>> changed all the ones you are referring to.
>
>> I agree with that decision; we should use mixed case for these parameters.
>> Otherwise we might get complaints that the following query does not return
>> any results:
>>   SELECT * FROM pg_settings WHERE name = 'timezone';

(I'm sure that you mean the opposite.  This query does not return any
results on HEAD, but it would with "TimeZone".)

> Yeah.  Like Michael upthread, I've wondered occasionally about changing
> these names to all-lower-case.  It'd surely be nicer if we'd done it
> like that to begin with.  But I can't convince myself that the ensuing
> user pain would be justified.

Perhaps not.  I'd like to think that a lot of queries on pg_settings
have the wisdom to apply a lower() or upper(), but that's very
unlikely.

-    errhint("Perhaps you need a different \"datestyle\" setting.")));
+    errhint("Perhaps you need a different DateStyle setting.")));

Saying that, I'd let this one be in 0002.  It causes a log of diff
churn in the tests and quoting it based on Alvaro's suggestion would
still be correct because it's fully lower-case.  (Yeah, I'm perhaps
nit-ing here, so feel free to counter-argue if you prefer what the
patch does.)
--
Michael