Re: apple uses Postgres for RemoteDesktop 2

On Wed, 18 Aug 2004 03:22:17 -0400
Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote

> Joel <rees(at)ddcom(dot)co(dot)jp> writes:
> > "Scott Marlowe" <smarlowe(at)qwest(dot)net> wrote
> >> Why can't the user and the OS use the same server?
>
> > Apple does some "weird" stuff with things.
>
> We learned this lesson from Cobalt, actually. Even if the OS installs
> an absolutely vanilla version of Postgres, it's a bad idea.

Maybe vanilla is the problem?

> The first
> problem is that the user may want to use a different PG version than the
> OS does. ("Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but soon ... and
> for the rest of your life ...") The second problem is that the user is
> going to want superuser privs over his database, including the ability
> to rm -rf it, initdb it, and possibly crash it if he's doing
> development; this is not something you want happening to part of the
> core GUI. (Cobalt had this problem in spades because their PG database
> *was* part of the core GUI. Screw around with it, and you'd be lucky if
> you could log in again. I trust that Remote Desktop isn't that core to
> OS X, but I'd still not care to admin that database while logged in
> through Remote Desktop.)

I think it's a separate app that costs money. I suppose I should check
their web site to see if they bundle it with Mac OS X Server.

> Even if you think that Joe Average User won't
> want to do this stuff, a Postgres developer who owns an Apple machine
> (moi for instance) certainly will. Is it in Apple's interest to make
> life hard for the developers of a technology they are depending on?
>
> > I suppose that the best advice to give the OP on this is to point out
> > how he can set up his own install of postgresql to use another port.

I guess I should say, "... the best advice for now ...".

(I submitted the second post in this thread to Apple's bug reporting
system, by the way. I don't know if they'll be happy with that.)

> This is backwards. The OS should stay out of the user's way, not vice
> versa.

Agreed.

> If the OS wants its own private PG server, I am surely all for
> that ... but it should not commandeer the port the user would expect to
> use for *his* PG server.

I'm thinking there would be security issues, as well.

If PostGreSQL could be set up to run two servers at once on separate
ports from one binary image, it might be reasonable to use the same
binary, but then there's also the issue of patches, updates, and
upgrades.

If Apple hired me to fix that for them, I'd probably put a system-use
only copy in there that would not be visible in the normal user's path,
and tweak it to use some other port. But I can see why they would be a
bit wary of multiplying installs of what seems to be essentially the
same program.

--
Joel <rees(at)ddcom(dot)co(dot)jp>