Sean Chittenden <s...@chittenden.org> writes:
> I agree it's not ideal for some filesystems, but being overly protective
> doesn't buy us much either, because in some setups, it's entirely acceptable.
No, it isn't. As several people have told you already, the idea of
letting a mount point be used directly as a data directory has been
suggested repeatedly, and rejected repeatedly, and this time is not
going to be any different. (Although I agree with Kevin that it's
about time we documented why not to do this.)
There are a couple of reasons why it's not good practice:
* mount-point directories really ought to be owned by root, or at least
by some user with more privilege than a DB server ought to have
* without a sub-directory, there's no simple cross-check to enforce that
the mount has actually happened. It's happened before that people have
had a server start up against a slow-to-mount NFS directory, and then
get completely confused when the mount did happen and the visible
database files got replaced. (The really nasty variants of this require
a startup script that will try to initdb automatically if it doesn't see
a database there.)
That's just what I can remember off the top of my head with insufficient
caffeine. If you check the archives for previous discussions you might
find some other good points.
regards, tom lane
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