The previous definitions of these GUC variables allowed them to range
up to INT_MAX, but in point of fact the underlying code would suffer
overflows or other errors with large values. Reduce the maximum values
to something that won't misbehave. There's no apparent value in working
harder than this, since very large delays aren't sensible for any of
these. (Note: the risk with archive_timeout is that if we're late
checking the state, the timestamp difference it's being compared to
might overflow. So we need some amount of slop; the choice of INT_MAX/2
is arbitrary.)
Per followup investigation of bug #7670. Although this isn't a very
significant fix, might as well back-patch.
The previous functions of assign hooks are now split between check hooks
and assign hooks, where the former can fail but the latter shouldn't.
Aside from being conceptually clearer, this approach exposes the
"canonicalized" form of the variable value to guc.c without having to do
an actual assignment. And that lets us fix the problem recently noted by
Bernd Helmle that the auto-tune patch for wal_buffers resulted in bogus
log messages about "parameter "wal_buffers" cannot be changed without
restarting the server". There may be some speed advantage too, because
this design lets hook functions avoid re-parsing variable values when
restoring a previous state after a rollback (they can store a pre-parsed
representation of the value instead). This patch also resolves a
longstanding annoyance about custom error messages from variable assign
hooks: they should modify, not appear separately from, guc.c's own message
about "invalid parameter value".