Re: RFC: programmable file format for postgresql.conf

On 12 Dec 2013 04:20, "Álvaro Hernández Tortosa" <aht(at)nosys(dot)es> wrote:

> Thanks, Greg. I've been going through those threads, they are
quite interesting. I didn't find an answer, though, about my question: why
parsing the postgresql.conf (and for instance preserving the comments while
writing it back) is no longer a problem

Parsing it isn't hard. It's precisely because the file isn't programmable
and is such a simple format that's easy to parse.

It's making changes and then writing it out again while preserving the
intended format that's hard.

So we convinced people to stop trying to do that.

The whole idea of include rules is to separate the portion of the file
that's human edited and the portion that's machine maintained. That's the
only viable strategy.