Re: PostgreSQL pollutes the file system

Symlinks would be great, because then the symlinks could be packaged
as an optional package.
such as;
- postgresql-11
- postgresql-client-11
- postgresql-client-symlinks-11
- postgresql-client-common
- postgresql-common

Then one might chose to not install the symlinks package or uninstall it.

And it would ease discoverability, predictability, intuitiveness, and
ease-of-use so much by just being able to type pg_<tab> to discover
all the PostgreSQL-related commands.

On Wed, Mar 27, 2019 at 6:26 PM Petr Jelinek
<petr(dot)jelinek(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
>
> 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