Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
> The precedence issues you (and Robert) are citing are no different
> from what we have currently in a single file.
I think that's *why* we're mentioning it. This would seem to be the
juncture to look for ways to improve that, not just settle for "no
worse" -- but perhaps that's not possible.
> If someone here thinks writing a tool which reliably parses and
> re-writes a hand-written PostgresQL.conf and runs on all the OSes we
> support is *easy*, then please write it for me! I'll happly use
> such a tool. But after wasting a couple dozen hours on the problem,
> I won't write one.
Perhaps the ease of writing something like that with sed or perl has
caused me to underestimate the effort required in C. I am curious
whether you actually mean that, or said it for rhetorical effect.
> Otherwise, please let us have our directory so that we can
> experiment with easy-to-write-and-revise autoconfig tools.
Well, I wouldn't vote against it since it seems to do me no harm; I
was just confused at the repeated assertion that update-in-place was
such a hard problem. Some of the people saying that seem to regularly
eat problems which seem much harder than that (to me, anyway) for
lunch. That seemed to suggest there could be other reasons for
wanting the directory approach which weren't getting proper focus. If
we solve the wrong problem, the solution is likely to be suboptimal
for the real issues.
-Kevin