Re: Configuring synchronous replication

Robert Haas wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 11:12 AM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> > Heikki Linnakangas <heikki(dot)linnakangas(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
> >> On 21/09/10 11:52, Thom Brown wrote:
> >>> My fear would be standby.conf would be edited by users who don't
> >>> really know XML and then we'd have 3 different styles of config to
> >>> tell the user to edit.
> >
> >> I'm not a big fan of XML either.
> >> ...
> >> Then again, maybe we should go with something like json or yaml
> >
> > The fundamental problem with all those "machine editable" formats is
> > that they aren't "people editable". ?If you have to have a tool (other
> > than a text editor) to change a config file, you're going to be very
> > unhappy when things are broken at 3AM and you're trying to fix it
> > while ssh'd in from your phone.
>
> Agreed. Although, if things are broken at 3AM and I'm trying to fix
> it while ssh'd in from my phone, I reserve the right to be VERY
> unhappy no matter what format the file is in. :-)
>
> > I think the "ini file" format suggestion is probably a good one; it
> > seems to fit this problem, and it's something that people are used to.
> > We could probably shoehorn the info into a pg_hba-like format, but
> > I'm concerned about whether we'd be pushing that format beyond what
> > it can reasonably handle.
>
> It's not clear how many attributes we'll want to associate with a
> server. Simon seems to think we can keep it to zero; I think it's
> positive but I can't say for sure how many there will eventually be.
> It may also be that a lot of the values will be optional things that
> are frequently left unspecified. Both of those make me think that a
> columnar format is probably not best.

Crazy idea, but could we use format like postgresql.conf by extending
postgresql.conf syntax, e.g.:

server1.failover = false
server1.keep_connect = true

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

+ It's impossible for everything to be true. +