Re: [PATCH] Stop ALTER SYSTEM from making bad assumptions

Greetings,

* Alvaro Herrera (alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com) wrote:
> On 2019-Jun-24, Robert Haas wrote:
>
> > On Sat, Jun 22, 2019 at 5:13 PM Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:
> > > All that said, whatever code it is that we write for pg_basebackup to do this properly should go into our client side library, so other tools can leverage that and avoid having to write it themselves.
> >
> > That is probably only going to help people who are writing in C (or
> > maybe some close family member) and a lot of tools for managing
> > PostgreSQL will be written in scripting languages.
>
> But we already have ALTER SYSTEM, so why do we need to write it again?
> You just need to check whether the system is running: if it is, connect
> and do "ALTER SYSTEM". If it isn't, do `echo ALTER SYSTEM | postgres
> --single`. Maybe we can embed smarts to do that in, say, pg_ctl; then
> everybody has access to it.

While I'm not against adding some kind of support like that if we feel
like we really need it, I tend to think that just having it in
libpgcommon would be enough for most tool authors to use..

Thanks,

Stephen