I've recently had some very unpleasant experiences trying to install test versions of MySQL on machines that already had older versions installed normally. It seems that MySQL *will* read /etc/my.cnf if it exists, whether it's appropriate or not, and so it's impossible to have a truly independent test installation, even though you can configure it to build/install into nonstandard directories. Let's not emulate that bit of brain damage.
regards, tom lane
It seems to me that this is a packaging problem and not a postgresql problem. If someone wants to package PostgreSQL so that there's a symlink to a config file in /etc/pgsql or vice versa for the main database they're welcome to do that, and why not? As for test databases, there's already a -D for the datadir, why not add a -C for the config file as many software packages allow. Then packagers could put the config file anywhere they wanted. I would certainly welcome this feature as it would allow for easy tweaking/benchmarking.
I agree that we should avoid the viral-like MySQL configuration plague.
As to pgsql AT mohawksoft.com requested, here are a few widely used software packages that keep configuration close to the data, some in /var, some in /usr:
Mailman
OpenSSL
Cyrus-IMAP
Apache I believe doesn't install anything to /etc/ when you build from source.
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