On Mon, Oct 29, 2012 at 4:31 PM, Jim Nasby <jim@nasby.net> wrote: > For whatever it's worth... we (and presumably others) still use londiste (or > Slony) as our upgrade path, so we could tolerate a cluster-wide setting. > We'd just set it when building new clusters via londiste and forget about > it. > > So I'd rather see this get in at a cluster level than not make it at all > while we wait for something better.
Yeah. I definitely think that we could shed an enormous amount of complexity by deciding that this is, for now, an option that can only be selected at initdb time. That would remove approximately 85% of everything I've ever disliked about this patch - without, I think, precluding the possibility of improving things later.
I see one thing to be concerned about, there...
I imagine it would not be a totally happy thing if the only way to switch it on/off was to use Slony or Londiste to replicate into a database with the opposite setting. (e.g. - This implies that built-in replication may only replicate into a database with the identical checksum configuration.)
It's not outrageous for it to be a pretty heavyweight operation to switch polarities, but there's such a thing as too heavy. --
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"