Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> writes:
> That all sounds nice, but unless you intend to fix all the constraints
> that force some values to be set-only-at-postmaster-start, it's never
> going to be possible to promise that a reload has the same effect as
> restarting the server. We could do this for values that are not
> PGC_POSTMASTER, but the argument given above for doing it is bogus.
Well that's true, that's a limitation of Postgres's reloading config files.
Certainly I think it should be a goal to avoid any such guc variables where
it's worth the effort. That doesn't mean you have to make the "problem" worse
and go in a completely different direction.
I would say it would be reasonable to print a warning if loading the new
config file results in a different value for any guc variable that can't be
changed.
If that's too awkward then at least it would be nice to put a warning line in
the initial default config file to mark any such guc variables.
--
greg