Re: [PATCH] Stop ALTER SYSTEM from making bad assumptions

On 8/3/19 8:24 AM, Andres Freund wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 2019-08-03 08:22:29 +0900, Ian Barwick wrote:
>> What I came up with shoehorned a stripped-down version of the backend
>> config parser into fe_utils and provides a function to modify pg.auto.conf
>> in much the same way ALTER SYSTEM does, but with only the basic syntax
>> checking provided by the parser of course. And for completeness a
>> client utility which can be called by scripts etc.
>
>> I can clean it up and submit it later for reference (got distracted by other things
>> recently) though I don't think it's a particularly good solution due to the
>> lack of actual checks for the provided GUCSs (and the implementation
>> is ugly anyway); something like what Andres suggests below would be far better.
>
> I think my main problem with that is that it duplicates a nontrivial
> amount of code.

That is indeed part of the ugliness of the implementation.