Re: About the pid and opts files

Tom Lane wrote:
> 
> Chris Bitmead <chrisb@nimrod.itg.telstra.com.au> writes:
> > Tom Lane wrote:
> >> Right --- it should be *possible* to change these vars, but it should
> >> take some explicit action.  Having a different value in your environment
> >> at postmaster start time is probably not enough of an explicit action.
> >>
> >> This whole thread makes me more and more uncomfortable about the fact
> >> that the postmaster/backend pay attention to environment variables at
> >> all.  An explicit configuration file would seem a better answer.
> 
> > Why a configuration file? Why not a configuration table?
> 
> Circularity.  A lot of this stuff has to be known before we dare touch
> the database at all.

Aren't there other things like pg_database that survive this problem?