[JelteF]

One of the authors of the patch here. Two reasons:

1. This config option approach was extremely easy to implement

2. Because making this auto.conf read-only would break many existing tools around Postgres that write to auto.conf

[int_19h]

But in this scenario, wouldn't you want to break those tools precisely because they are going around the centralized config from which .conf is supposed to be generated?

[MBCook]

But that file gets read at startup. So making changes there is a valid way of making changes.

What you really want is to prevent postgres from writing to that file.

That’s more complicated than just making it write only for everyone. Adding an option to stop postgres from doing what you don’t want it to do makes sense to me.