Re: initdb and "exit_nicely"...

At 11:35 AM 18-05-2000 -0400, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
>On Thu, May 18, 2000 at 11:05:58AM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> "Len Morgan" <len-morgan(at)crcom(dot)net> writes:
>> > RedHat based rpm installations create the postgres superuser account as
>> > part of the process and set the home directory for this user to PG_DATA.
>>
>> To be blunt, that's *incredibly* brain dead.
>
>Does Red Hat actually make the _data_ directory the home? Debian avoids
>this by making /var/lib/postgres the home, and data/ under that the PGDATA
>directory. It sure doesn't seem a good idea to be using PGDATA as a home
>directory.

I dunno, AFAIK it didn't seem to do such a thing. If it did, it should be
changed- very dangerous. Files may be uploaded or written to unfortunate
places.

I think initdb should NOT touch existing PGDATA directories. Let the user
take the responsibility for rm -rf or moving/renaming. If PGDATA exists it
should leave it, or at worst rename it to PGDATA.old.1 (increasing number
or maybe datetime).

This way less badness is likely to happen. Sure it's a bit inconvenient to
have to delete stuff yourself, but compared to accidentally deleting a
whole bunch of stuff, I think mv or rm are easy (in fact I bet some people
have found them too easy ;) ).

Cheerio,

Link.