Re: exposing pg_controldata and pg_config as functions

On 09/08/2015 04:21 PM, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> On 9/7/15 7:32 PM, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
>> Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>>
>>> I already gave a use case that you dismissed in favour of a vague solution
>>> that we don't actually have. You seem to be the only person objecting to
>>> this proposal.
>> I think that use case would be better served by a completely different
>> interface -- some way to query the server, "does this installation
>> support feature X?" What you proposed, using a regexp to look for
>> --enable-xml in the pg_config --configure output, doesn't look all that
>> nice to me.
> Agreed.
>
>

The problem is that at least this user's system had something odd about
it. so that I wouldn't entirely trust the output of

select is_supported
from information_schema.sql_features
where feature_name = 'XML type';

to reflect the config.

I also have cases where clients don't want to give me superuser access,
and sometimes not even shell access, and it could well be useful to me
to be able to say to them "OK, you need to make sure that this file in
this location has this entry".

cheers

andrew