Re: Idea: closing the loop for "pg_ctl reload"

Jan de Visser <jan(at)de-visser(dot)net> writes:
> Attached a new patch, rebased against the current head. Errors in
> pg_hba.conf and pg_ident.conf are now also noticed.

> I checked the documentation for pg_ctl reload, and the only place where
> it's explained seems to be runtime.sgml and that description is so
> high-level that adding this new bit of functionality wouldn't make much
> sense.

BTW, it's probably worth pointing out that the recent work on the
pg_file_settings view has taken away a large part of the use-case for
this, in that you can find out more with less risk by inspecting
pg_file_settings before issuing SIGHUP, instead of SIGHUP'ing and
hoping you didn't break anything too nastily. Also, you can use
pg_file_settings remotely, unlike pg_ctl (though admittedly you
still need contrib/adminpack or something to allow uploading a
new config file if you're doing remote admin).

I wonder whether we should consider inventing similar views for
pg_hba.conf and pg_ident.conf.

While that's not necessarily a reason not to adopt this patch anyway,
it does mean that we should think twice about whether we need to add
a couple of hundred lines for a facility that's less useful than
what we already have.

BTW, this version of this patch neglects to update the comments in
miscadmin.h, and it makes the return convention for
ProcessConfigFileInternal completely unintelligible IMO; the inaccuracy
and inconsistency in the comments is a symptom of that. I didn't read it
in enough detail to say whether there are other problems.

regards, tom lane