Re: Where to load modules from?

On Sat, Sep 14, 2013 at 4:15 PM, Dimitri Fontaine
<dimitri(at)2ndquadrant(dot)fr> wrote:
> We can attack the problem in several ways:
>
> - have an initdb switch to tweak the library path per cluster,

I see no advantage to making this impossible to change after initdb time.

> - have a superuser-only GUC to tweak the library path,

I could live with a GUC. Like Andres, I think it should be PGC_POSTMASTER.

> - consider on-disk extension as templates and move their module files
> somewhere private in $PGDATA and load the code from there

I think this will be horrid mess of security vulnerabilities and upgrade woes.

Here's another idea. At initdb time, create an empty directory called
called pg_you_can_load_stuff_from_here (pick a better name) inside
$PGDATA. Allow it to be replaced with a symlink. This would be
similar to what we do today with pg_xlog. In fact, you can imagine an
equivalent of initdb -X that does something precisely analogous. This
feels a bit more natural to me than a GUC.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company