On Thu, Jul 6, 2023 at 4:15 PM Justin Pryzby <pry...@telsasoft.com> wrote: > I'm still hoping.
Hi, I got asked to take a look at this thread. First, I want to explain why I think this thread hasn't gotten as much feedback as Justin was hoping. It is always possible for any thread to have that problem just because people are busy or not interested. However, I think in this case an aggravating factor is that the discussion is very "high context"; it's hard to understand what the open problems are without reading a lot of emails and understanding how they all relate to each other. One of the key questions is whether we should replace PGC_S_FILE with PGC_S_TEST in AlterSystemSetConfigFile. I originally thought, based on reading one of the emails, that the question was whether we should do that out of some sense of intellectual purity, and my answer was "probably not, because that would change the behavior in a way that doesn't seem good." But then I realized, reading another email, that Justin already knew that the behavior would change, or at least I'm 90% certain that he knows that. So now I think the question is whether we want that behavior change, but he only provided one example of how the behavior changes, and it's not clear how many other scenarios are affected or in what way, so it's still a bit hard to answer. Plus, it took me 10 minutes to figure out what the question was. I think that if the question had been phrased in a way that was easily understandable to any experienced PostgreSQL user, it's a lot more likely that one or more people would have had an opinion on whether it was good or bad. As it is, I think most people probably didn't understand the question, and the people who did understand the question may not have wanted to spend the time to do the research that they would have needed to do to come up with an intelligent answer. I'm not saying any of this to criticize Justin or to say that he did anything wrong, but I think we have lots of examples of stuff like this on the mailing list, where people are sad because they didn't get an answer, but don't always realize that there might be things they could do to improve their chances. On the behavior change itself, it seems to me that there's a big difference between shared_preload_libraries=bogus and work_mem=bogus. The former is valid or invalid according to whether bogus.so exists in an appropriate directory on the local machine, but the latter is categorically invalid. I'm not sure to what degree we have the infrastructure to distinguish those cases, but to the extent that we do, handling them differently is completely defensible. It's reasonable to allow the first one on the theory that the presently-invalid configuration may at a later time become valid, but that's not reasonable in the second case. So if changing PGC_S_FILE to PGC_S_TEST in AlterSystemSetConfigFile is going to have the effect of allowing garbage values into postgresql.auto.conf that would currently get blocked, I think that's a bad plan and we shouldn't do it. But it's quite possible I'm not fully understanding the situation. -- Robert Haas EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
