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From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Andrei Klychkov <andrew.a.klychkov@gmail.com>
cc: Jim Jones <jim.jones@uni-muenster.de>,
 Fujii Masao <masao.fujii@gmail.com>,
        pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Fix ALTER SYSTEM empty string bug for GUC_LIST_QUOTE
 parameters
In-reply-to: <117311.1762027906@sss.pgh.pa.us>
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Comments: In-reply-to Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
	message dated "Sat, 01 Nov 2025 16:11:46 -0400"
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I wrote:
> Andrei Klychkov <andrew.a.klychkov@gmail.com> writes:
>> 2. It doesn't look to me that v5 solves the original issue of a user
>> running ALTER SYSTEM SET <setting like shared_preload_libraries> = ''; ,
>> then restarting the server and not getting it back online.

> [ shrug... ]  It's not supposed to "solve" that.  That command is
> erroneous, and if you didn't test the setting before restarting the
> server, you shouldn't be too surprised if restart fails.

If you are feeling excited about that specific case, I think the
correct solution would be to install a GUC check_hook for
shared_preload_libraries (and probably its siblings too).  It couldn't
go so far as to actually dlopen() the list items, but it could check
that each one resolves as an accessible file.

A potential objection is that this could result in unwanted failures
in some scenarios, say where you're restoring a dump and haven't
yet installed all the relevant extensions.  I'm not quite sure if
there are realistic scenarios where that's actually a problem.
If it is, perhaps we could adjust the check_hook so it issues
WARNINGs not hard errors.

I'm not sure it's worth the trouble though.  A quick look at dfmgr.c
suggests that it'd take quite a lot of refactoring (or else code
duplication, not good) to be able to apply the library lookup process
without actually doing dlopen.  In any case that would be a totally
different patch from what we are discussing here.

> Anyway, the attached v6 is the same as v5, except now with proposed
> doc changes and a draft commit message.  I spent some effort on
> getting the ALTER SYSTEM and SET ref pages back into sync; it seemed
> like more care has been taken with the ALTER SYSTEM synopsis and
> other details.

Hearing no further comments, I'm going to go ahead with v6.

			regards, tom lane