• Tom Lane's avatar
    Doc: improve documentation of configuration settings that have units. · cfb75590
    Tom Lane authored
    When we added the GUC units feature, we didn't make any great effort
    to adjust the documentation of individual GUCs; they tended to still
    say things like "this is the number of milliseconds that ...", even
    though users might prefer to write some other units, and SHOW might
    even show the value in other units.  Commit 6c9fb69f made an effort
    to improve this situation, but I thought it made things less readable
    by injecting units information in mid-sentence.  It also wasn't very
    consistent, and did not touch all the GUCs that have units.
    
    To improve matters, standardize on the phrasing "If this value is
    specified without units, it is taken as <units>".  Also, try to
    standardize where this is mentioned, right before the specification
    of the default.  (In a couple of places, doing that would've required
    more rewriting than seemed justified, so I wasn't 100% consistent
    about that.)  I also tried to use the phrases "amount of time",
    "amount of memory", etc rather than describing the contents of GUCs
    in other ways, as those were the majority usage in places that weren't
    overcommitting to a particular unit.  (I left "length of time" alone
    in a couple of places, though.)
    
    I failed to resist the temptation to copy-edit some awkward text, too.
    
    Backpatch to v12, like 6c9fb69f, mainly because v12 hasn't diverged
    much from HEAD yet.
    
    Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/15882.1571942223@sss.pgh.pa.us
    cfb75590
config.sgml 428 KB