Tom Lane wrote:
There is a pretty well understood convention that a configuration file will be located in some standard location depending on your distro. Would you disagree with that?mlw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:The idea that a, more or less, arbitrary data location determines the database configuration is wrong. It should be obvious to any administrator that a configuration file location which controls the server is the "right" way to do it.I guess I'm just dense, but I entirely fail to see why this is the One True Way To Do It. What you seem to be proposing (ignoring syntactic-sugar issues) is that we replace "postmaster -D /some/data/dir" by "postmaster -config /some/config/file". I am not seeing the nature of the improvement. It looks to me like the sysadmin must now grant the Postgres DBA write access on *two* directories, viz /some/config/ and /wherever/the/data/directory/is. How is that better than granting write access on one directory? Given that we can't manage to standardize the data directory location across multiple Unixen, how is it that we will be more successful at standardizing a config file location?All I see here is an arbitrary break with our past practice. I do not see any net improvement.
There is also a convention that most servers are configured by a configuration file, located in a central location. Look at sendmail, named,, et al.
Here is the test, configure a server, with sendmail, named, apache, and PostgreSQL. Tell me which of these systems doesn't configure right.
