Re: Proposal for Allow postgresql.conf values to be changed via SQL

Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> writes:
>> I should think that doing this requires heading back towards there
>> being a single unique configuration stream, and over the course of
>> several versions, deprecating the INCLUDE directive.

> Oh, maybe I should take a closer look at Amit's proposal then. I
> thought we planned to make use of the INCLUDE facility for SET
> PERSISTENT, including supporting include-if-exists. Possibly what he's
> proposing and what I thought our last consensus were are highly divergent.

I'm not convinced we ever *had* a consensus on this. There were
proposals, but I'm not sure a majority ever bought into any one of 'em.
The whole problem of intermixing manual editing and programmatic editing
is just a big can of worms, and not everybody is prepared to give up the
former to have the latter.

You can, if you are so inclined, implement something functionally
equivalent to Amit's proposal today using contrib/adminpack's
pg_file_write --- okay, it's much less convenient than a built-in
implementation would be, but you can drop some variable assignments into
a file and then put a suitable INCLUDE into the otherwise-static main
config file. The fact that this isn't being done by a large number of
people (is anybody at all actually doing it?) suggests to me that maybe
the demand isn't all that great.

regards, tom lane