Re: [Util] Warn and Remove Invalid GUCs

Hi Greg,

> Well, we do have ways to view all *potential* extensions. I find myself more sympathetic to the OP than the others here, as I think it's a good idea to display a warning for a potentially misspelled GUC prefix (but do nothing else - certainly not remove it!). 

I'm really glad that you understood the problem statement clearly - thank you for the positive response.

> Will such a warning be seen? Perhaps not, but that's a risk any warning message has to face. And obviously there could be false positives if an extension decides to name their GUCs something other than pg_available_extensions()->name but hopefully that's a rare case (and shame on them if so.)

I do agree that such warnings might sometimes go unnoticed in the logs. However, by configuring specific log-related GUCs, it's possible to surface Postmaster warnings directly on the terminal during a PostgreSQL restart, rather than just logging them to a file. We've been using this setup in our production environments, and it's proven helpful in identifying typos right at server startup.

For example,

~ pgrestart waiting for server to shut down.... done server stopped waiting for server to start....2025-05-23 13:48:20 GMT::@:[29146]:WARNING:  invalid configuration parameter name "pg_stut_statements.max" 2025-05-23 13:48:20 GMT::@:[29146]:DETAIL:  "pg_stut_statements.max" doesn't has a reserved prefix. 2025-05-23 13:48:21 GMT::@:[29146]:LOG:  redirecting log output to logging collector process 2025-05-23 13:48:21 GMT::@:[29146]:HINT:  Future log output will appear in directory "pg_log". done server started

So I felt this approach might be beneficial to others as well.



Regards,
Shaik Mohammad Mujeeb
Member Technical Staff
Zoho Corp