On 2020-11-24 13:32, Magnus Hagander wrote:
> I think it boils down to that today the output from initdb is entirely
> geared towards people running initdb directly and starting their
> server manually, and very few people outside the actual PostgreSQL
> developers ever do that. But there are still a lot of people who run
> initdb through their wrapper manually (for redhat you have to do that,
> for debian you only have to do it if you're creating a secondary
> cluster but that still a pretty common operation).
Perhaps it's worth asking whom the advice applies to then. You suggest
it's mostly developers. I for one am still grumpy that in 9.5 we
removed the variant of the hint that suggested "postgres -D ..." instead
of pg_ctl. I used to copy and paste that a lot. The argument back then
was that the hint should target end users, not developers. I doubt that
under the current circumstances, running pg_ctl start from the console
is really appropriate advice for a majority of users. (For one thing,
systemd will kill it when you log out.) I don't know what better advice
would be, though. Maybe we need to add some kind of text adventure game
into initdb.
--
Peter Eisentraut
2ndQuadrant, an EDB company
https://www.2ndquadrant.com/
