Re: proposal: a validator for configuration files

On Jun 16, 2011, at 8:01 PM, Florian Pflug wrote:

> On Jun16, 2011, at 18:46 , Alexey Klyukin wrote:
>> On Jun 16, 2011, at 6:49 PM, Florian Pflug wrote:
>>> Hm, wouldn't a test for "context == PGC_POSTMASTER" be more appropriate?
>>
>> In such a case the errors caused by command-line arguments won't stop the postmaster.
>> PGC_S_FILE seems to handle this correctly. I'm not sure whether it is appropriate to use
>> there though.
>
> Ah, yeah, you're right. PGC_S_FILE sounds fine, then. I guess this means you can
> drop the check for "context == PGC_SIGHUP" though, because surely the source must
> be PGC_S_DEFAULT or PGC_S_FILE if context == PGC_SIGHUP, right? So the check would
> become
>  if (source == PGC_S_FILE || source == PGC_S_DEFAULT)
> where it now says
>  if (context == PGC_SIGHUP || source == PGC_S_DEFAULT)

Yes, AFAIK PGC_SIGHUP is redundant, thank you for the suggestion.

>>
>> I just recalled a reason for counting the total number of errors. There is a condition that
>> checks that the total number of errors is less than 100 and bails out if it's more than that
>> (100 is arbitrary). The reason is to avoid bloating the logs w/ something totally unrelated
>> to postgresql.conf. That was suggested by Tom Lane here:
>> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2009-03/msg01142.php
>
> Ah, right, I missed that. Guess it'll have to stay a counter, then. Still, I don't think it's
> worth the effort to make the count correct in case of included files, so I'd say just add
> a comment explaining that the count isn't totally accurate.

Well, while thinking about this I decided to leave the counter for the ParseConfigFp, but
drop it in ProcessConfigFile. The case we are protecting against is a single file full of junk.
It's unlikely that this junk would contain include directives with valid file paths, neither it's
likely to find a file with a correct syntax, but full of invalid directives.

Thank you,
Alexey.

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