"Andrew Hammond" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I agree. But perhaps the solution instead of failing is to throw a > warning to the effect of "Not to be pedantic, but you said mb and > millibits as a unit doesn't make sense in this context. Assuming you > meant MB (MegaBits)." and then start up. > Generally I'm against guessing what the user really wants, but in this > case, it seems pretty difficult to guess wrong. But either way I'm > always dead set against _silently_ guessing.
Bear in mind that the typical place for this sort of thing is postgresql.conf, and for problems in that file the only place we can emit a warning is into the postmaster log, which far too many users never look at (if indeed it's going anywhere but /dev/null in the first place). So I can't get very excited about "report a warning" as a compromise solution. Personally I don't find the argument about "someday we might want to support measurements in millibits" to be convincing at all, and certainly it seems weaker than the argument that "units should be case insensitive because everything else in this file is". The SQL spec has to be considered a more relevant controlling precedent for us than the SI units spec, and there are no case-sensitive keywords in SQL. regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings