Re: Permanent settings

Tom Lane wrote:
> Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com> writes:
>   
>> The problem I've constantly run into with parsing and modifying settings 
>> in a user-edited postgresql.conf file is that sometimes users do their 
>> own chronological documentation:
>> [snip]
>>     
>
> Yeah, those are good examples.  It would be fairly easy to deal with a
> postgresql.conf file that's in a pristine state, but I can see that
> distinguishing "commented-out values" from actual comments is likely
> to be AI-complete :-(
>
>   

How about if we provide for a magic value of 'default' for every 
setting? So the model config file would move from lines like this:
   #port = 5432                # (change requires restart)

to lines like this:
   port = default               # 5432  (change requires restart)

So we'd never uncomment a commented out line.

That way we could preserve comments, which would be a Good Thing (tm)

Then I think Tom's original proposal suitably modified would make sense.

cheers

andrew