Re: Providing catalog view to pg_hba.conf file - Patch submission

On 3/5/15 9:42 AM, Greg Stark wrote:
> Well if you want to read the file as is you can do so using the file
> reading functions which afaik were specifically intended for the
> purpose of writing config editing tools.

Sure, but those things are almost never installed by default, and I
don't want to install them if they provide easy write access, and they
don't help you find the actual file. This proposal is much nicer.

> Joining against other catalog tables may be kind of exaggerated but if
> I have data in an SQL view I certainly expect to be able to write
> WHERE clauses to find the rows I want without having to do string
> parsing. If it were a comma-delimited string I have to do something
> like WHERE users LIKE '%,username,%' but then that's not good enough
> since it may be the first or last and the username itself may contain
> white-space or a comma etc etc.

The point is, it should be one or the other (or both), not something in
the middle.

It's either a textual representation of the file or a semantic one. If
it's the latter, then all user names, group names, and special key words
need to be resolved in some way that they cannot be confused with
unfortunately named user names. And there needs to be a way that we can
add more in the future.