Cannot parse list of tags: {invalid_flag,<<"partitioned">>} on Windows

[big-r81]

Description

Sometimes the following log messages appears when starting CouchDB for the very first time.

[error] 2023-02-20T07:09:21.191000Z couchdb@localhost <0.130.0> -------- Cannot parse list of tags: 
{invalid_flag,<<"partitioned">>}

Steps to Reproduce

No reproducable steps found so far. It's only on the very first run of CouchDB on Windows after install.

• CouchDB version used: 3.3.1
• Operating system and version: Windows 10 Pro

[nickva]

It's probably because of list_to_existing_atom in

couchdb/src/couch/src/couch_flags_config.erl

Line 161 in a1fc807

list_to_existing_atom(FlagNameS)

There may be a chicken-and-egg problem: we're trying to load the flags before we're loading the first instance or anything creating the partitioned` atom.

We should see if list_to_existing_atom actually protects us from unauthorized users creating unreasonable amount of atoms (normally are not allowed unrestricted access to populate .ini config files). Or, we could have to predefined somewhere a list of expected atoms which may appear in flags.