Re: PostgreSQL pollutes the file system

On Fri, Apr 12, 2019 at 3:20 PM Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>
wrote:

> On 2019-Apr-12, Daniel Gustafsson wrote:
>
> > There are many good reasons for the changes proposed in this thread, but
> I'm
> > not sure if discoverability is one. Relying on autocompleting a
> filename to
> > figure out existing tooling for database maintenance and DBA type
> operations
> > seems like a fragile usecase.
> >
> > If commandline discoverability is of importance, providing a summary of
> the
> > tools in "man postgresql" seems like a better option.
>
> The first comment in the LWN article:
> "It's broken and obviously a bad idea but we've been doing it for so long
> we
> shouldn't attempt to fix it"
>
> IMO the future is longer than the past, and has more users, so let's do
> it right instead of perpetuating the mistakes.
>

I agree we should look at fixing these. However I have two concerns.

1. naming things is surprisingly hard. How sure are we that we can do this
right? Can we come up with a correct name for initdb? Maybe
pg_createcluster?
2. How long would our deprecation cycle be? 5 years? 10 years? Given
that people may need to support multiple versions I would propose no
warnings until both formats are supported, then warnings for 2 years, then
drop the old ones.

>
>
> ... unless you think PostgreSQL is going to become irrelevant before
> 2050.
>
> --
> Álvaro Herrera https://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
> PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services
>

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