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

On Sat, Jun 22, 2019 at 5:13 PM Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:
> All that said, whatever code it is that we write for pg_basebackup to do this properly should go into our client side library, so other tools can leverage that and avoid having to write it themselves.

That is probably only going to help people who are writing in C (or
maybe some close family member) and a lot of tools for managing
PostgreSQL will be written in scripting languages. It is unlikely
that those people are going to get all of the rules for parsing a file
full of GUC settings exactly right, because translating flex into
Python is probably not anybody's idea of a fun time. So you'll end up
with a bunch of rewrite-postgresql.auto.conf tools written in
different languages at varying degrees of quality many of which will
misfire in corner cases where the GUC names contain funny characters
or the whitespace is off or there's unusual quoting involved.

If you just decreed that it was OK to append to the file, you could
avoid all that.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company