Jeff Hoffmann <jeff@propertykey.com> writes:
> not to be pedantic, but just to make sure, i looked in the 7.0 docs and
> it says it plain as day on the "alternate locations" section from the
> admin guide, second paragraph "This
> environment variable must have been defined before the backend was
> started" this is an incredibly common question for being spelled out
> that directly in the documentation. this statement should probably be
> bold or italic or otherwise emphasized,
Actually, first it should be *corrected*. It should say "... defined
before the POSTMASTER is started". Or even more directly, "... supplied
in the postmaster's environment variable set".
As is, it can reasonably be read that you just have to define the variable
in your own environment before starting a psql session (which starts a
backend of course).
The critical distinction that people aren't making is between their
client environment and the postmaster/backend environment, and the
existing text doesn't seem to help them.
regards, tom lane