Wow, there's been a lot of discussion on this issue!
While it won't address some of the issues that have been brought up,
there is one very simple thing we can do that will help sysadmins
quite a lot: eliminate the postmaster's use of $PGDATA, and force the
data directory to be specified on the command line. It's fine if the
shell scripts still use $PGDATA, but the postmaster should not.
The reason is that at least it'll always be possible for
administrators to figure out where the data is by looking at the
output of 'ps'.
While I'd prefer to also see a GUC variable added to the config file
that tells the postmaster where to look for the data, the above will
at least simplify the postmaster's code (since the logic for dealing
with $PGDATA can be eliminated) while eliminating some of the trouble
administrators currently have with it.
--
Kevin Brown kevin@sysexperts.com
