Re: Parsing config files in a directory

On Oct 24, 2009, at 4:01 PM, Dimitri Fontaine <dfontaine(at)hi-media(dot)com>
wrote:
> Le 24 oct. 2009 à 20:10, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> a écrit
> :
>>> $PGDATA/postgresql.conf
>
> I think the multiple files should go in $PGDATA/postgresql.conf.d
>
>> But the only way to solve the problem of
>> machine-parsing the config file is to remove the instructions (which
>> can only EVER be parsed by human beings) and put them somewhere else.
>
> Not true. The problem we're trying to solve, methinks, is to be able
> to provide a kind of SET PERMANENT feature.
>
> The easiest alternative for providing this given current conf file
> content style is to offer one file per GUC, where the first non
> comment line is supposed to contain the option value.
>
> Now if you first load postresql.conf then files in postresql.conf.d,
> you did not change current behavior for $EDITOR people and made it
> easy to have SET PERSISTENT + free form comment.

I guess that would solve the problem of knowing which comment is
associated with which setting, but it won't prevent SET PERSISTENT
from falsifying a comment like "the previous value of this setting was
4MB, but I changed it on YYYY-MM-DD". Maybe we don't care about that,
though.

...Robert