Re: Permanent settings

Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> writes:
> On Tuesday 19 February 2008 15:05, Bruce Momjian wrote:
>> One idea would be to remove duplicate postgresql.conf appended entries
>> on server start.

> I think anything which has us appending extra settings to the end of the
> file is a non-starter. We'd get "I changed the setting, but nothing's
> happening" error reports 8x hour on #postgresql.

Yeah, I agree. Any proposal that makes it materially harder for people
to maintain the config files with an editor is going to suffer so much
push-back that it will ultimately fail. And adding extra copies of
settings to an existing file does make it harder.

What I would suggest is to write a function in contrib/adminpack that
updates the config file by replacing the variable assignment in-place.
(Yes, it will have to be smart enough to parse the config file, but
that hardly requires a great deal of smarts.) If that implementation
sees sufficient usage then we can migrate the functionality into core.

It was complained up-thread that some installations make the config
files read-only to the postgres user, but I see no conflict there.
Anyone who does that is saying that they don't *want* automatic changes
to the configuration settings. Such folk will not consider it a
feature for the database to make an end-run around that policy.

regards, tom lane