On Fri, 2023-12-29 at 13:38 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> > 2. It paves the way for GUCs that can only be set using a protocol
> > message (and not using SET).
>
> This is assuming facts not in evidence. Why would we want such a
> thing?
The problem came up during the binary_formats GUC discussion: it
doesn't really make sense to change that with a SQL query, and doing so
can cause strange things to happen.
We already have the issue with client_encoding and binary format COPY,
so arguably it's not worth trying to solve it. But protocol-only GUCs
was one idea that came up.
Regards,
Jeff Davis