Re: pgsql: Allow using syncfs() in frontend utilities.

On Fri, Mar 22, 2024 at 12:52:15PM -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> I'd like to complain about this commit's addition of a new appendix. I
> do understand the temptation to document caveats like this centrally
> instead of in multiple places, but as I've been complaining about over
> in the "documentation structure" thread, our top-level documentation
> index is too big, and I feel strongly that we need to de-clutter it
> rather than cluttering it further. This added a new chapter which is
> just 5 sentences long. I understand that this was done because the
> same issue applies to a bunch of different utilities and we didn't
> want to duplicate this text in all of those places, but I feel like
> this approach just doesn't scale. If we did this in every place where
> we have this much text that we want to avoid duplicating, we'd soon
> have hundreds of appendixes.

Sorry I missed this. I explored a couple of options last year but the
discussion trailed off [0].

> What I would suggest we do instead is pick one of the places where
> this comes up and document it there, perhaps the
> recovery_init_sync_method GUC. And then make the documentation for the
> other say something like, you know those issues we documented for
> recovery_init_sync_method? Well they also apply to this.

WFM. I'll put together a patch.

[0] https://postgr.es/m/20231009204823.GA659480%40nathanxps13

--
Nathan Bossart
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