Re: Configuring synchronous replication

On 21/09/10 18:12, Tom Lane 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.

I'm not very familiar with any of those formats, but I agree it needs to
be easy to edit by hand first and foremost.

> 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.

The ini file format seems to be enough for the features proposed this
far, but I'm a bit concerned that even that might not be flexible enough
for future features. I guess we'll cross the bridge when we get there
and go with an ini file for now. It should be possible to extend it in
various ways, and in the worst case that we have to change to a
completely different format, we can provide a how to guide on converting
existing config files to the new format.

--
Heikki Linnakangas
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com