On Sun, Jul 04, 2021 at 04:27:13PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote: > As I've been poking around in this area, I find myself growing > increasingly annoyed at the new GUC name > "debug_invalidate_system_caches_always". It is too d*mn long. > It's a serious pain to type in any context where you don't have > autocomplete to help you. I've kept referring to this type of > testing as CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS testing, even though that name is > now obsolete, just because it's so much shorter. I think we need > to reconsider this name while we still can. > > I do agree with the "debug_" prefix given that it's now visible to > users. However, it doesn't seem that hard to save some space in > the rest of the name. The word "system" is adding nothing of value, > and the word "always" seems rather confusing --- if it does > something "always", why is there more than one level? So a simple > proposal is to rename it to "debug_invalidate_caches".
I agree with all that. The word "always" has been misinformation, given the multiple levels available. > However, I think we should also give serious consideration to > "debug_clobber_cache" or "debug_clobber_cache_always" for continuity > with past practice (though it still feels like "always" is a good > word to lose now). "debug_clobber_caches" is another reasonable > variant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clobbering refers to cases where storage had no changes to its accessibility but now contains different data. That doesn't match InvalidateSystemCaches() especially well, so I think dropping that word has been a good step. Some other shorter terms could be debug_flush_caches, debug_rebuild_caches, or debug_expire_caches. (debug_caches is tempting, but that may ensnare folks looking for extra logging rather than a big slowdown.)
