On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 23:05, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> During the discussion of Alexey Klyukin's rewrite of ParseConfigFile,
> considerable unhappiness was expressed by various people about the
> complexity and relative uselessness of the custom_variable_classes GUC.
> While working over his patch just now, I've come around to the side that
> was saying that this variable isn't worth its keep. We don't have any
> way to validate whether the second part of a qualified GUC name is
> correct, if its associated extension module isn't loaded, so how much
> point is there in validating the first part? And the variable is
> certainly a pain in the rear both to DBAs and to the GUC code itself.
Don't forget that there are usecases for variables under
custom_variable_classes that aren't actually associated with
extensions (as general session-shared-variables). Though I guess if it
was somehow restricted to extensions, those who needed that could just
rewrap all their code as extensions - though that would make it less
convenient.
The point being that even if you *could* validate them somehow against
a static list, requiring that might not be a good idea.
> So at this point I'd vote for just dropping it and always allowing
> custom (that is, qualified) GUC names to be set, whether the prefix
> corresponds to any loaded module or not.
Seems reasonable to me.
--
Magnus Hagander
Me: http://www.hagander.net/
Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/