On 04/12/13 16:51, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
On 12/4/13, 1:42 AM, Álvaro Hernández Tortosa wrote:
IMHO, a data structure like the above would be completely
self-contained and allow any autoconfiguring tool or GUI tool to be
easily created, if the syntax is programmable. It would certainly make
the config file more verbose, but at the same time would help a lot of
users to configure postgres providing much more information.
What you are describing appears to be isomorphic to XML and XML Schema.
I don't think XML would be a good idea. Even if it is both
programatically and humanly editable (two of the features I was
suggesting for it), it is messy and very verbose for this purpose.
Note that you are not required to maintain your configuration data in a
postgresql.conf-formatted file. You can keep it anywhere you like, GUI
around in it, and convert it back to the required format. Most of the
I think it is not a very good idea to encourage GUI tools or tools to
auto-configure postgres to use a separate configuration file and then
convert it to postgresql.conf. That introduces a duplicity with evil
problems if either source of data is modified out-of-the-expected-way.
That's why I'm suggesting a config file that is, at the same time,
usable by both postgres and other external tools. That also enables
other features such as editing the config file persistently through a
SQL session.
metadata is available through postgres --describe-config, which is the
result of a previous attempt in this area, which never really went anywhere.
It's not like there are a bunch of GUI and autotuning tools that people
are dying to use or developers are dying to create, but couldn't because
editing configuration files programmatically is hard.
It might be a chicken-and-egg problem. Maybe it's hard and futile to
write this config tools since postgresql.conf doesn't support the
required features. I don't know how to measure the "interest of people"
but I have seen many comments on this mailing list about features like
this. IMHO it would be a great addition :)
Let's also not forget the two main use cases (arguably) of the
configuration files: hand editing, and generation by configuration
management tools. Anything that makes these two harder is not going to
be well-received.
100% agreed :) That's why I suggested that the format of the config
file should adhere to the requisites a) to e) mentioned on my original
email (http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/529b8d01.6060...@nosys.es).
Would it be well-received a new file format that keeps it simple for
both hand editing and generation of the configuration, and at the same
time offers the features I have mentioned?
Thanks for your comments,
aht
--
Álvaro Hernández Tortosa
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