Re: Sample configuration files

On Thu, Sep 8, 2016 at 8:52 AM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Vik Fearing <vik(at)2ndquadrant(dot)fr> writes:
>> I noticed that this patch has been marked Waiting on Author with no
>> comment. Peter, what more should I be doing right now while waiting for
>> Martín's review?
>
> FWIW, I agree with the upthread misgivings about whether this is actually
> a useful effort. Even if we installed the sample config files somewhere
> (something there is not consensus for AFAICT), they would not actually
> *do* anything useful as standalone files. I suppose you are imagining
> that people would either manually concatenate them onto postgresql.conf
> or insert an include directive for them into postgresql.conf, but neither
> of those things sound pleasant or maintainable.
>
> Moreover, it's not clear why anyone would do that at all in the age of
> ALTER SYSTEM SET.
>
> I suggest that it'd be more fruitful to view this as a documentation
> effort; that is, in each contrib module's SGML documentation file provide
> a standardized section listing all its parameters and their default
> settings. That would be something that could be copied-and-pasted from
> into either an editor window on postgresql.conf for the old guard, or
> an ALTER SYSTEM SET command for the new.

So, tallying up the votes, one person has spoken in favor of this
(Martín Marqués) and two against it (Tom Lane and Robert Haas). One
presumes the author is also in favor, so that's a 2-2 tie. That's not
exactly a consensus against this effort, but it's not a ringing
endorsement, either. It's hard for me to imagine anything getting
committed here unless some more people think it's a good idea.

So, anyone else have an opinion, pro or con?

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company