Re: Possibility to disable `ALTER SYSTEM`

On Wed, Mar 20, 2024 at 11:07 AM Jelte Fennema-Nio <postgres@jeltef.nl> wrote:
> > Ugh, please let's not do this. This was bouncing around in my head last night, and this is really a quite radical change - especially just to handle the given ask, which is to prevent a specific command from running. Not implement a brand new security system. There are so many ways this could go wrong if we start having separate permissions for some of our files. In addition to backups and other tools that need to write to the conf files as the postgres user, what about systems that create a new cluster automatically e.g. Patroni? It will now need elevated privs just to create the conf files and assign the new ownership to them. Lots of moving pieces there and ways things could go wrong. So a big -1 from me, as they say/ :)
>
> Well put. I don't think the effort of making all tooling handle this
> correctly is worth the benefit that it brings. afaict everyone on this
> thread that actually wants to use this feature would be happy with the
> functionality that the current patch provides (i.e. having
> postgresql.auto.conf writable, but having ALTER SYSTEM error out).

Yeah, I agree with this completely. I don't understand why people who
hate the feature and hope it dies in a fire get to decide how it has
to work.

And also, if we verify that the configuration files are all read-only
at the OS level, that also prevents the external tool from managing
them. Well, it can: it can make them non-read-only after server start,
then modify them, then make them read-only again, and it can make sure
that if the system crashes, it again marks them read-only before
trying to start PG. But it seems quite obvious that this will be
inconvenient and difficult to get right. I find it quite easy to
understand the idea that someone wants the PostgreSQL configuration to
be managed by Kubernetes rather than via by ALTER SYSTEM, but I can't
think of any scenario when you just don't want to be able to manage
the configuration at all. Who in the world would want that?