Re: Docs for service file

Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Bruce Momjian writes:
>
> > Tom Lane wrote:
> > > Rather than documenting it and thereby locking ourselves into a
> > > misdesigned "feature", I'd vote for removing code and docs too.
> > > We can put the concept on the TODO-for-protocol-change list instead.
> >
> > Other votes?
>
> I'm still looking for a reason to use this feature. Clearly, as it stands
> it is only single-host. And on a single host you can use the environment
> variables. Also, any reasonable application provides its own way to
> encapsulate database connection information. And the other emails don't
> convince me at all that this is somehow "Oracle-compatible".
>
> Maybe you want to use ODBC, which gives you something like this and much
> more.

Joe Conway says he uses this exact feature in Oracle. They just
distribute the file to the hosts. That seemed like a good reason to
keep it. Obviously the original patch submitter liked it too. I think
the nice thing was that you can just call the service name and get some
params. It seems better to do that than try to switch to the proper
environment variables before starting the app.

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