Re: location of the configuration files

Kevin Brown <kevin(at)sysexperts(dot)com> writes:
> I assume $PGDATA was around long before GUC?

Yes, it was. But I have not yet seen an argument here that justifies
why $SOMECONFIGDIRECTORY/postgresql.conf is better than
$PGDATA/postgresql.conf. The latter keeps all the related files
together. The former seems only to introduce unnecessary complexity.
You can only justify it as simpler if you propose hardwiring a value for
$SOMECONFIGDIRECTORY ... which is a proposal that will not fly with any
of the core developers, because we all run multiple versions of Postgres
on our machines so that we can deal with back-version bug reports,
test installations, etc. It is unlikely to fly with any of the RPM
packagers either, due to the wildly varying ideas out there about the
One True Place where applications should put their config files.

(This point was pretty much why mlw's previous proposal was rejected,
IIRC.)

regards, tom lane