On Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 07:43:47PM +0100, Joachim Wieland wrote:
> I propose to change it on the grounds that:
>
> - other unix daemons reset their values to defaults before reading
> conffiles
To be fair, most daemons can do this by simply re-execing themselves,
something we don't have the luxury of. For most daemons, the presense
of a line enables something which you can disable again. Most of our
config values are always present, whether or not they're commented out.
But the biggest issue is that not all values can be changed by
reloading the config files. So for these variables, no amount of
"making it more obvious" will change the fact that you're not running
with the values it says in the config file.
> - lots of people find it unintuitive
But resetting to defaults on reload doesn't solve the problem due to
the above issue. Also, once you know it's not that odd.
> - after restarting pgsql you can never be sure that it runs with
> the same configuration as before even with an unchanged postgresql.conf
>
> The mtime of postgresql.conf then makes you think that it has
> been running fine with these options for the last 3 months so you don't
> even take a look at the conf file but look for the problem elsewhere...
I'm sure you could find lots of people to go for a change, it's just
the mechanism that people don't agree on. What do you think should
happen to unchangable config values? You can always see what the
current values are using SHOW ALL.
Have a nice day,
--
Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> http://svana.org/kleptog/
> Patent. n. Genius is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. A patent is a
> tool for doing 5% of the work and then sitting around waiting for someone
> else to do the other 95% so you can sue them.
