Re: Permanent settings

On Tuesday 19 February 2008 14:32, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> > Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> >> Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> >>> IMO this should all be in the database and that's it. The idea that our
> >>> global settings are in a file seems unusual consider we have a
> >>> perfectly good storage engine available.
> >>
> >> That doesn't work, because many settings must be loaded before the
> >> database is fully operational.
> >

this is a valid objection, though I think it could be worked around. 

> > Not to mention what would happen if the database had a problem so we
> > couldn't read the config.
>

people bring this objection for moving pg_hba settings into the db, but I 
think the same answer applies; having a command line flag for the postmaster 
to read options from a file probably gets you around this. 

> Although, on further reflection, we could probably meet both of these
> objections by having the database maintain a text version of the config
> which it would load on startup.
>

yes, that would probably work. 

> One other possible objection is that it would allow  any superuser to
> set things that currently require direct access to the config files, so
> that would be a major change in security arrangements.
>

If you are superuser, you can write a C function (or just install adminpacks 
functions) and do this anyway. (there might be a way to prevent this, but I'm 
not quite sure how you would do it) 

-- 
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter LAMP :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL