On Mon, Aug 5, 2019 at 2:35 PM Stephen Frost <sfr...@snowman.net> wrote: > I dare say that if we had some documentation around what to expect and how to > deal with it, for our own tools as well as external ones, then maybe we > wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place. Clearly ALTER SYSTEM and > the pg_basebackup modifications had different understands and expectations.
But that's not the problem. The problem is that ALTER SYSTEM modifies the first match instead of the last one, when it's a well-established principle that when reading from a PostgreSQL configuration file, the system adopts the value from the last match, not the first one. I admit that if somebody had thought to document what ALTER SYSTEM was doing, that person would probably have also realized that they had made a mistake in the code, and then they would have fixed the bug, and that would be great. But we have exactly zero need to invent a new set of principles explaining how to deal with postgresql.auto.conf. We just need to make the ALTER SYSTEM code conform to the same general rule that has been well-established for many years. The only reason why we're still carrying on about this 95 messages later is because you're trying to make an argument that postgresql.auto.conf is a different kind of thing from postgresql.conf and therefore can have its own novel set of rules which consequently need to be debated. IMHO, it's not, it shouldn't, and they don't. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company
