Re: Installation layout is still hazardous for shared prefixes

Lamar Owen wrote:
>Tom Lane wrote:
>> To do that without creating problems, we'd have to go back to making
>> sure that all the programs we install have 'pg'-prefixed names. The
>> scripts (createdb and so forth) don't at the moment, and names like
>> 'createuser' clearly have potential for confusion if they are in non-
>> PG-specific directories.
>
>RedHat includes PostgreSQL, with executables in /usr/bin. There have
>been no namespace collisions as yet, with as many packages as RedHat
>ships.

The same applies to Debian, with something like 4000 binary packages in
the current development tree.

>> I think it would be a real bad idea to put the postmaster and postgres
>> executables right in /usr/local/bin. Perhaps it is time to think about
>> a separate 'sbin' directory for programs that aren't supposed to be
>> invoked by normal users. Those two, initdb, initlocation, and ipcclean
>
>This is doable, but not really necessary. However, if this is the
>direction things are going..... I can certainly work with it. In fact,
>I may go ahead with 7.1's RPMset and do that, popping those executables
>in /usr/sbin -- not a big change, by any means, except to the scripts
>that are bundled with the RPM.

In the Debian package, I have put the administrator programs in
/usr/lib/postgresql/bin. The postgres user has that directory in its path
so that all works properly. Since root cannot run these, I don't think it
appropriate to put them in /usr/sbin.

>A good, usable, shared prefix would make my job much easier. Great gobs
>of code in the spec file would go away as PostgreSQL loses the
>'/usr/local/pgsql'-centric thinking and gets more in the step of what is
>standard for packaging. And this would help even on system other than
>Linux FHS-compliant distributions. And it would not cause any problems
>for those who still want to use a prefix of /usr/local/pgsql.

Agreed.

--
Oliver Elphick Oliver(dot)Elphick(at)lfix(dot)co(dot)uk
Isle of Wight http://www.lfix.co.uk/oliver
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