Stephen Frost <sfr...@snowman.net> writes: > * Tom Lane (t...@sss.pgh.pa.us) wrote: >> I haven't been paying too close attention to this thread, but isn't >> that exactly what it does now and always has? guc.c, at least, certainly >> is going to interpret duplicate entries that way.
> The issue isn't with reading them and interpreting them, it's what > happens when you run ALTER SYSTEM and it goes and modifies the file. > Presently, it basically operates on the first entry it finds when > performing a SET or a RESET. Ah, got it. So it seems like the correct behavior might be for ALTER SYSTEM to (a) run through the whole file and remove any conflicting lines; (b) append new setting at the end. If you had some fancy setup with comments associated with entries, you might not be pleased with that. But I can't muster a lot of sympathy for tools putting comments in postgresql.auto.conf anyway; it's not intended to be a human-readable file. If anybody does complain, my first reaction would be to make ALTER SYSTEM strip all comment lines too. regards, tom lane