Re: faster testing with symlink installs

Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> On Wed, Feb 28, 2018 at 9:34 PM, Peter Eisentraut
> <peter(dot)eisentraut(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
>> Except ... this doesn't actually work. find_my_exec() resolves symlinks
>> to find the actual program installation, and so for example the
>> installed initdb will look for postgres in src/bin/initdb/. I would
>> like to revert this behavior, because it seems to do more harm than
>> good. The original commit message indicates that this would allow
>> symlinking a program to somewhere outside of the installation tree and
>> still allow it to work and find its friends. But that could just as
>> well be done with a shell script.

> My initial gut feeling is that changing this would hurt more people
> than it would help.

I agree. My recollection is that we expended substantial sweat to make
that type of setup work, and I do not think it was for idle reasons.
The fact that the behavior is very old doesn't mean it was a bad choice.
(Also, the fact that the commit message didn't explain the reasoning in
detail is not much of an argument; we didn't go in for that back then.)

regards, tom lane