what's the difference between plugin settings and config? https://meltano.com/tutorials/postgres-with-postgres.html#adding-a-custom-extractor has the following plugin config/settings:

plugins:
  extractors:
  - capabilities:
    - discover
    - properties
    - state
    executable: tap-postgres
    name: tap-postgres
    namespace: tap_postgres
    pip_url: tap-postgres==0.0.61
    settings:
      - name: dbname
        env: TAP_PG_DATABASE
      - name: host
        env: TAP_PG_ADDRESS
      - name: password
        env: TAP_PG_PASSWORD
      - name: port
        env: TAP_PG_PORT
      - name: user
        env: TAP_PG_USERNAME
    config:
      default_replication_method: FULL_TABLE
      include_schemas_in_destination_stream_name: true
  loaders:
 ... ... ...

but I can't see why some things are in settings and some in config. Looking at the source (https://github.com/singer-io/tap-postgres/blob/master/tap_postgres/__init__.py#L677-L702) the tap seems to have no difference and pulls them all from config. The only thing I can think of is that

settings

is an awkward way to add things so that you can specify that it should be set from an environment variable because it would be tricky to do that with the

config

style key/value pairs but that is nicer if you want to just hardcode things in the meltano.yml file but not sure if I'm missing something there?

settings

defines metadata for each setting (config property) a plugin supports: https://meltano.com/docs/contributor-guide.html#setting-definitions For discoverable plugins (that are supported out of the box and can be added using

meltano add <type> <name>

), that metadata is collected in `discovery.yml`: https://gitlab.com/meltano/meltano/-/blob/master/src/meltano/core/bundle/discovery.yml#L180 On custom plugin definitions that Meltano didn't know yet, this plugin metadata can be found in your own `meltano.yml`: https://meltano.com/docs/project.html#custom-plugin-definitions The actual current configuration for a plugin in your project can always be found under

config

in

meltano.yml

: https://meltano.com/docs/project.html#plugin-configuration Technically,

settings

are not required on custom plugin definitions in

meltano.yml

because all values under

config

are passed to the plugin anyway as "custom settings": https://meltano.com/docs/configuration.html#custom-settings However, if you don't want to store a setting value in

meltano.yml

, because it may be sensitive or environment-specific (like a token or password), you'd want to use an env var in

.env

, which requires Meltano to know about the setting so that its env var shows up in

meltano config <plugin> list

.

okay thanks, I think that's roughly what I'd figured out but wasn't 100% sure