We are currently maintaining information about configuration parameters in at least three places: the documentation, guc.c, and postgresql.conf.sample. I would like to generate these from a single source. Computationally, this is not very challenging, it's just a bit of work. I imagine as the source an XML file with a custom schema; see below for an example. I think this is the best source format because it allows integrating the DocBook-formatted descriptions without too much trouble and it allows for file format validation. An alternative might be m4 but that would not offer these features. To process this we'd use XSLT stylesheets run through xsltproc. We'd run this part during the tarball building phase, so users would not need it. Obviously, all of this will need some fine-tuning, but can we agree on this general direction?
<parameters> <group> <title>Query Tuning</title> <subgroup> <title>Planer Method Configuration</title> <parameter> <name>enable_hashagg</name> <context>userset</context> <shortdesc>Enables the planner's use of hashed aggregation plans.</shortdesc> <longdesc>blah</longdesc> <vartype>bool</vartype> <variable>enable_hashagg</variable> <resetval>true</resetval> <min>...</min> <max>...</max> <assignhook>...</assignhook> <showhook>...</showhook> </parameter> </subgroup> </group> </parameters> -- Peter Eisentraut http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/ ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: explain analyze is your friend