Re: Uncommented GUC in postgresql.conf.sample

When looking at the nearby suggestion to add deprecation comment for md5 in the
.conf.sample, I happened to notice that autovacuum_worker_slots isn't commented
out it the sample file.

AFAIK all GUCs in the sample file should be set to their defaults and left
commented out.  The attached does that for autovacuum_worker_slots and adds a
trivial test to test_misc to catch it (and modifies the existing test which
would've caught it). Or is there a case for leaving uncommented?

I don't think so.

+    # Make sure each line starts with either a # or whitespace
+    ok(0, 'missing # in postgresql.conf.sample') if ($line =~ m/^[^#\s]/);

This would probably be better written something like:

# non-blank lines must start with a # as the first non-blank character
unlike($line, qr/^\s*[^#\s]/, 'missing # in postgresql.conf.sample');

This will catch more error cases (e.g. a line that starts with spaces and then has a non-#). Also, "ok(0,...)" is a pattern you pretty much never want. My formulation will give better diagnostics if the test fails.

OTOH, if you want to skip a lot of ok's in the regress_log file, you can do something like:

fail("$line missing initial # in postgresql.conf.sample") if $line =~ /^\s*[^#\s]/;

cheers

andrew

--
Andrew Dunstan
EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com