Re: location of the configuration files - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On Thu, 2003-02-13 at 19:22, Adam Haberlach wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 13, 2003 at 05:59:17PM -0500, Robert Treat wrote:
> > On Thu, 2003-02-13 at 15:08, mlw wrote:
> > > Stephan Szabo wrote:
> > > 
> > > On Thu, 13 Feb 2003, mlw wrote:
> > Personally I think a postgresql installation is much more like an apache
> > installation, which generally contains all of the files (data and
> > config) under /usr/local/apache. Maybe someone can dig more to see if
> > that system is more appropriate a comparison than something like bind.
> 
>     I think you are making a pretty uninformed, if not just plain wrong 
> generalization.  I've run exactly one system with apache configuration 
> files in /usr/local/apache, and even then, the data was not there.

Uh... the last time I built apache from source, it stuck everything
under /usr/local/apache. It uses a conf directory for the config files,
and htdocs for the "data" files...  That is it's default configuration.

<snip stories of all the different ways people run apache>

You know, this is why I actually suggested looking closer at apache. By
default, everything is crammed in one directory, but if you want to, you
can configure it "six different ways to sunday". That seems to be a big
plus IMO

> 
> What does this mean?
> 
> People will put things in different places, and there are typically
> very good reasons for this.  This is ESPECIALLY true when one wants to
> have configuration files, at least the base ones in a common place such
> as /etc or /usr/local/etc in order to make backup of configuration easy
> and clean, while leaving data somewhere else for performance or magnitude
> of partition reasons.  It just makes sense to ME to have postgresql.conf
> reside in /etc, yet put my data in /var/data/postgresql, yet retain the
> option to put my data in /raid/data/postgresql at a later date, when the
> new hardware comes in.

Is anyone arguing against this? I'm certainly not. But maybe my needs
are more varied than yours. On my local development box, I run multiple
versions of apache, compiled with different versions of php. It really
helps to keep all of apache's stuff centralized, and using things like
rpms actually overly complicates this. Now sure, that's a development
machine, but on the phppgadmin demo server, which is essentially a
production system, I run three different versions of postgresql. In
fact, I need to upgrade two of those (to 7.2.4 and 7.3.2), I shudder to
think about doing that if postgresql forced me to use the /etc/
directory for all of my config files. Now sure, this probably isn't
typical use, but I would say that when it comes time to upgrade major
versions, unless you running an operation where you can have large
amounts of downtime, postgresql needs to have the ability to have
multiple versions install that don't conflict with each other, and it
needs to do this easily. The upgrade process is hard enough already.

<snip> 
> However, this seems, to me, to be a very small addition that has some real-world
> (and yes, we need to start paying attention to the real world) advantages.
> 
> And finally, don't go telling me that I'm wrong to put my data and config files
> where I am.  You can offer advice, but I'm probably going to ignore it because
> I like where they are and don't need to explain why.
> 

Have I wronged you in some former life? I've very little concern for
where you put your data files, and have no idea why you'd think I'd
criticize your setup. 

Robert Treat