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

On Thursday 13 February 2003 17:53, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Oliver Elphick wrote:
> > What your comments strongly suggest to me is that projects like
> > PostgreSQL and pine, along with everything else, should comply with FHS;
> > then there will be no confusion because everyone will be following the
> > smae standards.  Messes arise when people ignore standards; we have all
> > seen the dreadful examples of MySQL and the Beast, haven't we?

> Can the FHS handle installing PostgreSQL as non-root?

Once again, no one is trying to make an FHS install the default 'let's force
everyone to think our way or no way' coercion.

We just want the option.

For those who wish to do non-root installs, nothing would need to change.  You
can still put it into /usr/local/pgsql (assuming you have permissions to put
it there) or your home directory, or wherever.

I deal with RPMs; Oliver deals with .deb's.  Neither can be installed as
non-root.  The daemon can of course run as non-root (and it does, which is
exactly correct); but the installation of the files is done as root _always_
in an RPM or deb environment.  So I really don't care about non-root
installs; sorry.  I wonder what percentage of our users are not the
administrator of the machine on which they are running PostgreSQL?

I dispute the statement made earlier in the thread (not by Bruce) that
PostgreSQL is by definition not an OS service.  This is false, and needs to
be realized by this community.  PostgreSQL is becoming an essential OS core
service in many cases: virtually all Linux distributions (the lion's share of
our current distribution) include PostgreSQL as a core service.  Many of our
new users see PostgreSQL as 'SQL server' in the Red Hat installation menu.

Now, on a Win32 server, what is PostgreSQL going to be considered?  It is
probably going to run as a service, right? So you need to be Administrator
there to perform the install, right?

This isn't the same environment, Bruce, that you got into back when it was
still Postgres95.  We are in the big leagues OS-wise, and we need to act like
it.  Assuming that we are a 'userspace' program (which is a misnomer anyway,
as _anything_ non-kernel is 'userspace') is not going to cut it anymore.

So we need to fit in to an OS environment, whether it is FreeBSD, OS/X, Win32,
Solaris, or Linux.  In FreeBSD, as the ports maintainer excellently posted,
PostgreSQL should live in LOCALBASE.  We should make that easy.  In Win32,
configuration might be better stored in the system registry (Argh! Did I
actually say THAT! Yuck!) -- we should make even that easy.  In OS/X we
should use the OS/X paradigm (whatever that is).  And we should make it easy
to make PostgreSQL LSB-compliant for our very large Linux user community.  We
should be adaptable to the accepted administration paradigm on whatever
system we are running -- this should be a minimum.

These concerns vastly outweigh the occasional non-root install from source, in
my mind at least.  I am not opposed to that way even being the default; after
all, leaving the default the same as now agrees with the principle of least
surprise (although we really don't ascribe to that; witness the 7.2-7.3
migration fiasco -- 7.3 should have been 8.0 to warn people of the major
changes going on in client connections).  But I do advocate _allowing_ the
configuration options Mark has enumerated -- although I really wish we could
use the lowercase c instead, for consistency with other OS services.
--
Lamar Owen
WGCR Internet Radio
1 Peter 4:11