Re: exposing pg_controldata and pg_config as functions

On 2015-08-20 09:59:25 -0400, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> Is there any significant interest in either of these?
>
> Josh Berkus tells me that he would like pg_controldata information, and I
> was a bit interested in pg_config information, for this reason: I had a
> report of someone who had configured using --with-libxml but the xml tests
> actually returned the results that are expected without xml being
> configured. The regression tests thus passed, but should not have. It
> occurred to me that if we had a test like
>
> select pg_config('configure') ~ '--with-libxml' as has_xml;
>
> in the xml tests then this failure mode would be detected.

On my reading of the thread there seems to be a tenative agreement that
pg_controldata is useful and still controversy around pg_config. Can we
split committing this?

Greetings,

Andres Freund