Re: proposal: rounding up time value less than its unit.

* Robert Haas (robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com) wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 12:46 AM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> > TBH I've also been wondering whether any of these proposed cures are
> > better than the disease.
>
> I couldn't agree more. There's something to be said for just leaving
> this alone.

I've been coming around to this also. I had thought earlier that there
was consensus happening, but clearly that's not the case.

> > The changes that can be argued to make the
> > behavior more sane are also ones that introduce backwards compatibility
> > issues of one magnitude or another.
>
> But on this point I think David Johnston said it best:
>
> # Any change has the potential to draw complaints. For you it seems that "hey,
> # I upgraded to 9.5 and my logs are being rotated out every minute now. I
> # thought I had that turned off" is the desired complaint. Greg wants: "hey, my
> # 1 hour log rotation is now happening every minute". If the error message is
> # written correctly most people upon seeing the error will simply fix their
> # configuration and move on - regardless of whether they were proactive in
> # doing so having read the release notes.
>
> I particularly agree with his first sentence - any change can
> potentitally draw complaints. But I also agree with his last one - of
> those three possible complaints, I certainly prefer "I had to fix my
> configuration file for the new, stricter validation" over any variant
> of "my configuration file still worked but it did something
> surprisingly different from what it used to do.".

I'll agree with this also (which is why I had suggested moving forward
with the idea that I thought had consensus- keep things the way
they are, but toss an error if we round down a non-zero value to zero).

As with Tom, I'm not against being argued to a different position, such
as rounding up instead of down, but I still don't like the "near-zero
goes to zero" situation we currently have. I'd be much happier if we'd
pick one or the other and move forward with it, or agree that we can't
reach a consensus and leave well enough alone. Not entirely sure what
the best way to get to one of the above is, but I don't feel like we're
really making much more progress at this point.

Thanks,

Stephen