Re: Parsing config files in a directory

>> Let's NOT start that discussion again.
>
> Bruce's comments were a useful addition to the technical discussion.

Yes, I'm just trying to avoid sidelining this into a discussion of
search_path management commands, which we already failed to come to a
consensus spec for earlier this year. Not that we don't need to have
better search-path management, just that any discussion on that should
be a separate thread.

Overall, I'm seeing this patch proposal suffer from an extreme excess of
bike-shedding. The original proposal was to have a directory where one
could put config files; the revised spec was to allow directory
"includes" in postgresql.conf.

From there, this veered off into a discussion of how people *ought* to
manage their configuration files. While interesting, it's irrelevant to
the patch (and really ought to take place on pgsql-admin, anyway), which
does nothing other than give DBAs and tool-writers more flexibility on
how to manage PostgreSQL configurations.

And in this project, we've *always* been about more flexibility, so it's
hard for me to understand any objections to allowing directory includes
... especially when we already allow file includes.

My proposal is this:

(1) that we support the idea of a patch which allows people to add
directory includes to postgresql.conf, in the same manner that we now
support file includes, with files in the included directory to be
processed alphanumerically.

(2) that we put out a TODO for making the configuration variables which
take lists able to take an accumulator as well as an assignment, syntax
TBA.

These two above seem like nice, small incremental changes to 8.5 which
require no sweeping redesigns of how people handle conf files, but do
allow people who want to develop new management strategies to do so.

--Josh Berkus