Re: unite recovery.conf and postgresql.conf

On Sep23, 2011, at 17:46 , Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> On tis, 2011-09-20 at 16:38 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
>> For now, I think we're best off not changing the terminology, and
>> confining the remit of this patch to (a) turning all of the existing
>> recovery.conf parameters into GUCs and (b) replacing recovery.conf
>> with a sentinel file a sentinel file (name TBB) to indicate that the
>> server is to start in recovery mode. The naming isn't great but the
>> more we change at once the less chance of reaching agreement. It
>> seems like we have pretty broad agreement on the basics here, so let's
>> start with that.
>
> The only thing that's slightly bogus about that is that if you were
> doing an archive recovery, you'd have to edit the main postgresql.conf
> with one-shot parameters for that particular recovery (and then delete
> them again, or leave them in place, confusing the next guy). But
> perhaps that's worth the overall simplification.

OTOH, if they're GUCs, you can specify them on the postmaster's
command line. We could even get crazy and patch pg_ctl to allow

<untar base backup>
pg_ctl recover -D <dir> --target_xid=<the xid that broke stuff> --target_inclusive=false
pg_ctl start -D <dir>

best regards,
Florian Pflug