On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 8:55 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> writes:
>> Maybe it would be easier if multiple -k options accumulated.
>
> After further thought I'm not very enamored of that concept. We've made
> considerable compromises to ensure that every postmaster command-line
> option corresponds exactly to some GUC parameter; it does not seem to me
> that -k is important enough to deserve an exception.
>
> However, it occurs to me that Murray's original complaint about spaces
> in -k pathnames could be dealt with via very narrow changes in
> SplitDirectoriesString. That function was modeled on
> SplitIdentifierString, with perhaps not enough thought about the
> differences between identifiers and pathnames. In particular, I suggest
> that there's no need to reject embedded spaces in pathnames, and plenty
> of systems on which it's important not to. (Think "Program Files" on
> Windows, for instance.) It probably still makes sense to trim leading
> and trailing whitespace, but let's allow embedded spaces.
>
> If we did that, the new code would be incompatible with the old only for
> paths including commas, leading double quotes, or leading/trailing
> whitespace. I submit that all of those cases are pretty uncommon,
> especially compared to embedded space.
That seems reasonable.
--
Robert Haas
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