On Wed, Mar 16, 2022 at 2:47 PM Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > Stepping back a bit ... do we really want to institutionalize the > term "setting" for GUC variables? I realize that the view pg_settings > exists, but the documentation generally prefers the term "configuration > parameters". Where config.sgml uses "setting" as a noun, it's usually > talking about a specific concrete value for a parameter, and you can > argue that the view's name comports with that meaning. But you can't > GRANT a parameter's current value.
I agree that the lack of a good user-friendly term for GUCs is a real problem. Here at EDB I've observed even relatively non-technical people using that term, which appears nowhere in the documentation and is utterly unintelligible to a typical end-user. Somebody gets on the phone and tells the customer that they need to set a GUC and the customer is like "what's a guck?" except that they probably don't actually ask that question but are just confused and fail to understand that a postgresql.conf change is being proposed. I hate it. It sucks. I have sort of been trying to promote the use of the word "setting" and use it in my own writing, especially to end-users. That is definitely more intelligible to random users, but it's admittedly also awkward. "Set a setting" just sounds redundant. But "set a configuration variable" sounds wordy, so I don't know. -- Robert Haas EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
