On Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 02:37:53PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote: > Joachim Wieland <joe@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > >> There's been various discussions in the past about making this behavior > >> less non-intuitive, but nothing's been settled on ... > > So what about deciding now that it should be changed. What are the reasons > > for why it should be kept as it is? > 1. Backwards compatibility. Since you have to restart for a new version anyway and since I doubt that there are many tools around that change settings automatically and rely on today's behavior, the backwards compatibility problem only exists in the admin's head who either doesn't know about the problem at all or will read about it in the release notes before installing the new version. > 2. A comment is a comment. True, that's why a setting that gets commented is not in effect anymore and does not override the default setting for the respective option. If a comment is a comment, why should the server continue to run with the setting of a comment? You can also delete the setting, then the server runs with a setting that isn't documented in any place. > > - other unix daemons reset their values to defaults before reading > > conffiles > Examples please? inetd, Apache, squid, exim, postfix, a famous database starting with m... Joachim -- Joachim Wieland joe@xxxxxxxxxxx C/ Usandizaga 12 1°B ICQ: 37225940 20002 Donostia / San Sebastian (Spain) GPG key available