Re: Granting SET and ALTER SYSTE privileges for GUCs

On Wed, Mar 16, 2022 at 2:47 PM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)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