On Sun, Apr 12, 2020 at 11:02 AM Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> wrote: > There's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pg_(Unix). > > So it's been removed from posix, but not unlikely to be around. For example, I see it on a server with Debian 9 (Stretch) or Ubuntu 16.04 which is still well in support (but not on a RedHat from the same era).
Well, if it's around on older distros, but not in the newest versions, I think we should try to lay speedy claim to the name before something else does, because any other name we pick is going to be longer or less intuitive or, most likely, both. There's no guarantee that PostgreSQL 14 would even get packaged for older distros, anyway, or at least not by the OS provider.
It definitely won't be by the OS provider, however it will be by *us*. Our apt and yum repositories support all our versions on "all supported" versions of the upstream distros. So we should at least have a plan and a story for how to deal with that, and make sure all our own packagers deal with it the same way.
We could also have an alternate name, like pgsql, and make 'pg' a symlink to it that packagers can choose to omit. (I would prefer pgsql to pg_ctl, both because I think it's confusing to adopt the name of an existing tool as the meta-command and also because the underscore requires pressing two keys at once, which is slightly slower to type). But there is no way anyone who is a serious user is going to be happy with a five-character meta-command name that requires six key-presses to enter (cf. cvs, git, hg, yum, pip, apt, ...).
Agreed, pgsql would certainly be better than pg_ctl.
