* Tom Lane (tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us) wrote:
> > There are others where min_val is -1 for the same reason, where
> > functionally the minimum is really 0. Some of us would like to see
> > min_val reflect the useful minimum, period, and move all these special
> > case ones out of there. That is a multi-year battle to engage in
> > though, and there's little real value to the user community coming out
> > of it relative to that work scope.
>
> The impression I had was that Stephen was thinking of actually setting
> min_val to 1 (or whatever) and handling zero or -1 in some out-of-band
> fashion, perhaps by adding GUC flag bits showing those as allowable
> special cases. I'm not sure how we would display such a state of affairs
> in pg_settings, but other than that it doesn't sound implausible.
Yes. I'm not 100% sure about how to deal with it in pg_settings, but
that is the general idea.
> We could alternatively try to split up these cases into multiple GUCs,
> which I guess is what you're imagining as a "multi-year battle". But
> personally I think any such proposal will fail on the grounds that
> it's too much compatibility loss for the value gained.
Agreed.
Thanks,
Stephen