Re: Glitch in handling of postmaster -o options

On Sun, Sep 30, 2001 at 12:54:25AM +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Tom Lane writes:
> > While that's not a fatal problem, I could imagine *much* more serious
> > misbehavior from inconsistent settings of some GUC parameters.  Since
> > backends believe that these parameters have PGC_POSTMASTER priority,
> > they'll accept changes that they probably oughtn't.  For example,
> >     postmaster -o --shared_buffers=N
> > will cause things to blow up very nicely indeed: backends will have
> > a value of NBuffers that doesn't agree with what the postmaster has.
> 
> This is a bug.  PG 7.1 wouldn't let this thing go through but with all the
> changes made for the RESET ALL functionality (I think) this has snuck in.
> 
> My best guess is that this change was made to allow using
> SetConfigOption() in PostgresMain() with options that are really
> postmaster-global and are passed down to the backends.  But AFAICS there
> aren't any such options anymore.
> 
> > I wonder whether we should retire -o.

How about putting -o stuff after -p?  That way only postmaster
code can set PGC_POSTMASTER options for a backend, no way for
user to mess up.  ATM this would break -o -F tho'.

-- 
marko