Re: Improving postgresql.conf

Andreas Pflug <pgadmin@pse-consulting.de> writes:
> How about *requiring* to set any variable, at least to xxx='default'? 

Don't like that ... we are not in the fascism business here ;-).
How would you enforce it anyway?

The idea of special-casingvar = default
(with no quotes around 'default') doesn't seem unreasonable, but
then you'd want to show the default in the file, andvar = default       # default 42, range 1-100
is maybe getting a bit cluttered.

There is another issue in all this, which is that in the current scheme
of things postgresql.conf settings override postmaster environment
variables, for those few things for which we still accept environment
variables --- it looks like PGPORT, PGDATESTYLE, PGCLIENTENCODING are
the only remaining ones in CVS tip.  If we put noncomment values for
these things into postgresql.conf then the environment variables will
be dead letters; we may as well just remove that code completely.
This might break things for some people.

(Note I am not speaking here of libpq's handling of these variables
on the client side, but of the fact that the *server* takes note of
these environment variables.)
        regards, tom lane