Tom Lane wrote:
>
>The point was to allow a GUI utility to be built that would help in
>editing postgresql.conf. It couldn't assume the postmaster is already
>running, so just extending the pg_config view wouldn't answer, and
>duplicating knowledge of all the GUC variables in a separate tool
>would have created maintenance headaches. I would like to think that
>the patch would eventually allow us to generate postgresql.conf.sample
>automatically from the guc.c tables, and thereby reduce the number of
>files to maintain, but that didn't get done yet. The reason for having
>both "long" and "short" descriptions of the variables was that I foresaw
>the "short" versions as becoming the per-line comments in
>postgresql.conf. The "long" descriptions were what the GUI tool wants.
>
>
>
I have been wondering if moving to XML for config files might be a good
idea - and if there are going to be GUIs that write them that gives some
more impetus to the idea.
This occurred to me as I was writing the token replacement stuff for
initdb.c, and I realised how fragile it was - a misplaced space and you
are hosed.
Or would it be overkill?
cheers
andrew