Ubuntu Packages / Config Files

All,

apologies if this has been addressed somewhere already. I don't have a
lot of experience in PostgreSQL; this is my first setup where I'm trying
to scale and provide some of the more advanced features (like WAL
shipping, master-slave sync, integrating pgbouncer, etc.), and I'm
looking for help regarding the configuration files.

I'm using Ubuntu 12.04 for these deployments at the moment. The Ubuntu
packages don't put the configuration files with the cluster data (by
default under /var/lib/postgresql/9.1/main under 12.04), but in
/etc/postgresql/9.1/main) and they start postgres with the -c option
pointing there.

Whenever I try to add a slave, first I stop the postgresql service, move
the above data directory to something like
/var/lib/postgresql/9.1/main.orig, create a new 'main' directory with
identical permissions/ownerships, and start pg_basebackup pointing
there. It will not copy the server.crt and server.key symlinks (by
default pointing to the "snakeoil" cert/key) so I re-create those. I
then put the appropriate recovery.conf into /etc/postgresql/9.1/main,
given that that's the configuration directory where everything is. I set
"wal_level = hot_standby" and "hot_standby = on" in postgresql.conf.
After I then start the postgresql service again.

The problem is that recovery.conf gets ignored in this case. I can add
another symlink pointing to it into the data directory, for example, or
copy the file there, then it works, but honestly this has cost me a LOT
of time figuring out.

So, a couple of questions:

1) am I even going about this the right way under an Ubuntu system?
2) do the packages available at apt.postgresql.org behave differently?
3) do later versions of postgresql behave differently?

Eventually, I'd like to use configuration management tools like puppet
to deploy something like that, but I suppose that's a topic for another day.

Any pointers appreciated,

Stephan