Re: Proposal: new file format for hba/ident/hosts configuration?

On Thu, Jul 9, 2026 at 5:43 PM Jacob Champion <
jacob(dot)champion(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 9, 2026 at 2:19 PM Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> wrote:
> >> Freeze the parsing of old-style files; new features and changes go only
> in the new format. This should eliminate (well, almost eliminate) the
> maintenance burden associated with having two file formats.
> >
> > That's the scenario Tom warned against upthread.
>
> But if, hypothetically, a new format were indeed a big improvement for
> people, it's probably what we should do.
>
>
>

I think the bar is going to be fairly high. And just jumping to a new
format is going to create a world of pain for users. We'd need to carry the
old format for a while as well, I think, and also provide some conversion
tools.

I do agree that sometimes the formats can make expressiveness very clumsy.
A recent example is the log_min_messages work.