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Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2008 08:18:11 -0500
From: Decibel! <decibel@decibel.org>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Greg Smith <gsmith@gregsmith.com>, Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net>,
	pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org, Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>
Subject: Re: Overhauling GUCS
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On Mon, Jun 02, 2008 at 10:12:06AM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Greg Smith <gsmith@gregsmith.com> writes:
> > Joshua has been banging a drum for a while now that all this data needs to 
> > get pushing into the database itself.
> 
> This is, very simply, not going to happen.  Shall we go over the reasons
> why not, one more time?
> 
<snip>
> 
> I have no objection to providing alternative ways to edit the
> configuration data, but the primary source of the settings is
> going to continue to be an editable text file.  Any proposals for
> alternatives-to-a-text-editor have to work within that reality.

There's no reason that the server has to deal with a text file. I
completely agree that there must be a method to change settings even if
the database isn't running, but that method does not necessarily need to
be a text file. If we can come up with a standard API for reading and
writing config changes, we (or anyone else) can write any number of
tools to deal with the settings. And once we have an API, we can provide
a SQL interface on top of it.

Instead of focusing on exactly what the 'new postgresql.conf' is going
to look like we should focus on creating a clean configuration API. Once
we have that we can figure out what (if anything) we're doing with the
existing .conf, and what a new one (if it exists) might look like.
-- 
Decibel!, aka Jim C. Nasby, Database Architect  decibel@decibel.org 
Give your computer some brain candy! www.distributed.net Team #1828