Re: PostgreSQL pollutes the file system

On 27/03/2019 15:26, Tomas Vondra wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 27, 2019 at 03:07:24PM +0100, Andreas Karlsson wrote:
>> On 3/27/19 2:51 PM, Tomas Vondra wrote:
>>> I think the consensus in this thread (and the previous ancient ones) is
>>> that it's not worth it. It's one thing to introduce new commands with
>>> the
>>> pg_ prefix, and it's a completely different thing to rename existing
>>> ones.
>>> That has inherent costs, and as Tom pointed out the burden would fall on
>>> people using PostgreSQL (and that's rather undesirable).
>>>
>>> I personally don't see why having commands without pg_ prefix would be
>>> an issue. Especially when placed in a separate directory, which
>>> eliminates
>>> the possibility of conflict with other commands.
>>
>> I buy that it may not be worth breaking tens of thousands of scripts
>> to fix this, but I disagree about it not being an issue. Most Linux
>> distributions add PostgreSQL's executables in to a directory which is
>> in the default $PATH (/usr/bin in the case of Debian). And even if it
>> would be installed into a separate directory there would still be a
>> conflict as soon as that directory is added to $PATH.
>>
>
> That is true, of course.

It's only partially true, for example on my systems:

Debian/Ubuntu:
$ readlink -f /usr/bin/createuser
/usr/share/postgresql-common/pg_wrapper

Centos (PGDG package):
readlink -f /usr/bin/createdb
/usr/pgsql-11/bin/createdb

This also means that the idea about symlinks is something packages
already do.

--
Petr Jelinek http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services