Re: PostgreSQL pollutes the file system

On Wed, Mar 20, 2019 at 11:06 AM Andreas Karlsson <andreas(at)proxel(dot)se> wrote:

> On 3/19/19 11:19 AM, Fred .Flintstone wrote:
> > PostgreSQL pollutes the file system with lots of binaries that it is
> > not obvious that they belong to PostgreSQL.
> >
> > Such as "/usr/bin/createdb", etc.
> >
> > It would be better if these files were renamed to be prefixed with
> > pg_, such as pg_createdb.
> > Or even better postgresql-createdb then be reachable by through a
> > "postgresql" wrapper script.
>
> Hi,
>
> This topic has been discussed before e.g. in 2008 in
> https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/47EA5CC0.8040102%40sun.com and
> also more recently but I cannot find it in the archives right now.
>
> I am personally in favor of renaming e.g. createdb to pg_createdb, since
> it is not obvious that createdb belongs to PostgreSQL when reading a
> script or looking in /usr/bin, but we would need a some kind of
> deprecation cycle here or we would suddenly break tons of people's scripts

I wouldn't be opposed to this, but I would note two points on a deprecation
cycle:
1 Given that people may have tools that work with all supported versions
of PostgreSQL, this needs to be a long cycle, and
2. Managing that cycle makes it a little bit of a tough sell.

> .
>
> And as for the git-like solution with a wrapper script, that seems to be
> the modern way to do things but would be an even larger breakage and I
> am not convinced the advantage would be worth it especially since our
> executables are not as closely related and consistent as for example git's.
>

Git commands may be related, but I would actually argue that git commands
have a lot of inconsistency because of this structure,

See, for example, http://stevelosh.com/blog/2013/04/git-koans/

>
> Andreas
>
>

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