Re: Improving postgresql.conf

Tom Lane wrote:

>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 ;-).
>  
>

Well enforcing setting variables, in the presence of a preconfigured 
file isn't exactly fascism... But I'm not surprised to read your 
objection :-)

>How would you enforce it anyway?
>  
>

Each cfg var would need a 'touched' flag. On startup, an ERROR is 
thrown, on SIGHUP a WARNING. Or just a warning, stating which value is 
actually used?
WARNING: xxx not set, using (default) value yyy.

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

In any case, var=default seems valuable.

>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.
>  
>
I'd opt for that.

>This might break things for some people.
>  
>
A check for environment could remain in the code, throwing a warning 
"environment is ignored",  if that's really used.

How about vars overridden on the postmaster command line? Similar issue, 
I believe. Naively, I'd assume that my last instruction (in this case: 
changing postgresql.conf and SIGHUP) would determine processing, which 
is obviously wrong if I read the docs correctly.

Regards,
Andreas