Re: Overhauling GUCS

On Sun, 1 Jun 2008, Joshua D. Drake wrote:

> Well I don't know that a minimum of comments is what I am arguing as
> much as not too much comments.

Josh's proposal included making three levels of documentation-level
comments available: terse, normal, and verbose. The verbose comment
level probably should include a web link to full documentation. The way
the comments litter the existing file, the status quo that's called normal
mode in this proposal, is IMHO a complete mess. Most use cases I can
think of want either no comments or really verbose ones, the limited
commentary in the current sample postgresql.conf seems a middle ground
that's not right for anybody.

The key thing thing here in my mind is that it should be possible to
transform between those three different verbosity levels without losing
any settings or user-added comments. They're really just different views
on the same data, and which view you're seeing should be easy to change
without touching the data.

I just extracted the original design proposal and some of the relevent
follow-up in this thread, made some additional suggestions, and put the
result at http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/GUCS_Overhaul I think reading
that version makes it a bit clearer what the proposed overhaul is aiming
for.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD