Re: exposing pg_controldata and pg_config as functions

On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 7:12 AM, Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> wrote:
> On 2015-08-20 09:59:25 -0400, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>> Is there any significant interest in either of these?
>>
>> Josh Berkus tells me that he would like pg_controldata information, and I
>> was a bit interested in pg_config information, for this reason: I had a
>> report of someone who had configured using --with-libxml but the xml tests
>> actually returned the results that are expected without xml being
>> configured. The regression tests thus passed, but should not have. It
>> occurred to me that if we had a test like
>>
>> select pg_config('configure') ~ '--with-libxml' as has_xml;
>>
>> in the xml tests then this failure mode would be detected.
>
> On my reading of the thread there seems to be a tentative agreement that
> pg_controldata is useful and still controversy around pg_config. Can we
> split committing this?

Yeah, the last version of the patch dates of August, and there is
visibly agreement that the information of pg_controldata provided at
SQL level is useful while the data of pg_config is proving to be less
interesting for remote users. Could the patch be rebased and split as
suggested above?
--
Michael