Re: Why some GUC parameter names are not lowercased

On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 12:11 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> Gurjeet Singh <singh(dot)gurjeet(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > Is there a reason why Postgres chose to not use all lowercase characters
> > for these parameters' names.
> > DateStyle
> > IntervalStyle
> > TimeZone
>
> It's historical, for sure. I think we've discussed changing them and
> decided it would be more likely to break things than improve matters.
>
> In particular, modern style would probably be more like "date_style"
> etc, but we definitely could not insert underscores without breaking
> applications all over the place. So the best we could do is just
> smash to lowercase, eg "datestyle", which isn't really a readability
> improvement. And there would still be some risk of breaking
> applications that are expecting these names to print a particular way.
>

Can we develop aliases to these parameters, that adhere to the standard.
Next release we can mark the old ones as deprecated and a few releases down
the line completely remove the non-stsandard names and rest easy.

Would be happy to contribute such a patch. I think it'd be trivial.

--
Gurjeet Singh

http://gurjeet.singh.im/