Re: [PATCH] Stop ALTER SYSTEM from making bad assumptions

On Fri, Jun 21, 2019 at 8:15 PM Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jun 17, 2019 at 10:50 AM Ian Barwick
> <ian.barwick@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> > In Pg12, the code in pg_basebackup implies the correct thing to do is append to .auto.conf,
> > but as demonstrated that can cause problems with duplicate entries.
>
> Yeah.
>
> To me, forcing every tools author to use postgresql.conf parsing tools
> rather than just appending to the file is a needless burden on tool
> authors.
>

OTOH, if we give license to all the tools that they can append to the
.auto.conf file whenever they want, then, I think the contents of the
file can be unpredictable.  Basically, as of now, we allow only one
backend to write to the file, but giving a free pass to everyone can
create a problem.   This won't be a problem for pg_basebackup, but can
be for other tools.