Re: drop postmaster symlink

Hi,

On 2022-11-23 15:48:04 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> writes:
> > On 2022-11-23 10:07:49 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> >> On the whole, is it really that hard to add the symlink to the meson build?
>
> > No. Meson has a builtin command for it, just not in the meson version we're
> > currently requiring. We can create the symlink ourselves instead. The problem
> > is just detecting systems where we can't symlink and what to fall back to
> > there.
>
> This isn't a hill I want to die on, either way. But "it's a bit
> more complicated in meson" seems like a poor reason for changing
> the user-visible installed fileset.

I wouldn't even have thought about proposing dropping the symlink if it hadn't
been deprecated forever, and I suspect Peter wouldn't have either...

I think this is a bit more more complicated than "changing the user-visible
installed fileset" because we didn't have logic to create 'postmaster' on
windows before, afaik the only OS without reliable symlink support.

Anyway, my current thinking is to have dumb OS dependent behaviour and create
a symlink everywhere but windows, where we'd just copy the file.

Or we could just continue to not install 'postmaster' on windows, because of
the potential confusion that 'postmaster.exe' differing from 'postgres.exe'
could cause.

Greetings,

Andres Freund