Re: Configuring synchronous replication

On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 11:12 AM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Heikki Linnakangas <heikki(dot)linnakangas(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
>> On 21/09/10 11:52, Thom Brown wrote:
>>> My fear would be standby.conf would be edited by users who don't
>>> really know XML and then we'd have 3 different styles of config to
>>> tell the user to edit.
>
>> I'm not a big fan of XML either.
>> ...
>> Then again, maybe we should go with something like json or yaml
>
> The fundamental problem with all those "machine editable" formats is
> that they aren't "people editable".  If you have to have a tool (other
> than a text editor) to change a config file, you're going to be very
> unhappy when things are broken at 3AM and you're trying to fix it
> while ssh'd in from your phone.

Agreed. Although, if things are broken at 3AM and I'm trying to fix
it while ssh'd in from my phone, I reserve the right to be VERY
unhappy no matter what format the file is in. :-)

> I think the "ini file" format suggestion is probably a good one; it
> seems to fit this problem, and it's something that people are used to.
> We could probably shoehorn the info into a pg_hba-like format, but
> I'm concerned about whether we'd be pushing that format beyond what
> it can reasonably handle.

It's not clear how many attributes we'll want to associate with a
server. Simon seems to think we can keep it to zero; I think it's
positive but I can't say for sure how many there will eventually be.
It may also be that a lot of the values will be optional things that
are frequently left unspecified. Both of those make me think that a
columnar format is probably not best.

--
Robert Haas
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