On Sat, Jun 22, 2019 at 5:13 PM Stephen Frost <sfr...@snowman.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