On 09/22/2010 04:18 AM, Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
On 21/09/10 18:12, Tom Lane wrote:
Heikki Linnakangas<heikki.linnakan...@enterprisedb.com> writes:
On 21/09/10 11:52, Thom Brown wrote:
My fear would be standby.conf would be edited by users who don't
really know XML and then we'd have 3 different styles of config to
tell the user to edit.
I'm not a big fan of XML either.
...
Then again, maybe we should go with something like json or yaml
The fundamental problem with all those "machine editable" formats is
that they aren't "people editable". If you have to have a tool (other
than a text editor) to change a config file, you're going to be very
unhappy when things are broken at 3AM and you're trying to fix it
while ssh'd in from your phone.
I'm not very familiar with any of those formats, but I agree it needs
to be easy to edit by hand first and foremost.
I think the "ini file" format suggestion is probably a good one; it
seems to fit this problem, and it's something that people are used to.
We could probably shoehorn the info into a pg_hba-like format, but
I'm concerned about whether we'd be pushing that format beyond what
it can reasonably handle.
The ini file format seems to be enough for the features proposed this
far, but I'm a bit concerned that even that might not be flexible
enough for future features. I guess we'll cross the bridge when we get
there and go with an ini file for now. It should be possible to extend
it in various ways, and in the worst case that we have to change to a
completely different format, we can provide a how to guide on
converting existing config files to the new format.
The ini file format is not flexible enough, IMNSHO. If we're going to
adopt a new config file format it should have these characteristics,
among others:
* well known (let's not invent a new one)
* supports hierarchical structure
* reasonably readable
I realize that the last is very subjective. Personally, I'm very
comfortable with XML, but then I do a *lot* of work with it, and have
for many years. I know I'm in a minority on that, and some people just
go bananas when they see it. Since we're just about to add a JSON parser
to the backend, by the look of it, that looks like a reasonable bet.
Maybe it uses a few too many quotes, but that's not really so hard to
get your head around, even if it offends you a bit aesthetically. And it
is certainly fairly widely known.
cheers
andrew
