Re: [HACKERS] Point in Time Recovery

[ ... some desultory reading of PITR patch ... ]

What is the point of having both archive_program and archive_dest as
GUC variables? Wouldn't it be simpler to fold them into one parameter,
viz

archive_command = 'cp %s /archivedir'

For that matter, do we need a separate archive_mode boolean? The one
thing I can positively guarantee about archive_dest (or archive_command)
is that we cannot come up with a useful default for it (no, /tmp isn't
good). Therefore it does not seem very reasonable to let the user turn
on archiving without having explicitly specified an archive destination.

I propose that we fold all three GUC flags into a single archive_command
string whose built-in default is an empty string, and you enable
archiving by setting it to something nonempty.

regards, tom lane