Re: drop postmaster symlink

On 11/23/22 15:10, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 23, 2022 at 2:50 PM Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> wrote:
>> On 2022-11-23 10:07:49 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>> > Devrim =?ISO-8859-1?Q?G=FCnd=FCz?= <devrim(at)gunduz(dot)org> writes:
>> > > ...and it helps us to find the "main" process a bit easily.
>> >
>> > Hmm, that's a nontrivial point perhaps. It's certain that this
>> > will break some other people's start scripts too.
>>
>> OTOH, postmaster has been deprecated for ~15 years.
>
> Yeah. Also, I don't think it's generally too hard to find the parent
> process anyway, because at least on my system, the other ones end up
> with ps display that looks like "postgres: logical replication
> launcher" or whatever. The main process doesn't set the ps status
> display, so that's the only one that shows a full path to the
> executable in the ps status, which is how I usually spot it. That has
> the advantage that it doesn't matter which name was used to launch it,
> too.

Same here

> I don't actually care very much whether we get rid of the postmaster
> symlink or not, but if we aren't going to, we should stop calling it
> deprecated. If 15 years isn't enough time to remove it, what ever will
> be? I tend to think it's fairly pointless and perhaps also a bit
> confusing, because the product is postgres not postmaster and people
> can reasonably expect the binary name to match the product name. But
> if we keep it, I don't think anything too dire will happen, either.

FWIW, the reason I took note of the postmaster symlink in the first
place a few years ago was because selinux treats execution of programs
from symlinks differently than from actual files.

--
Joe Conway
PostgreSQL Contributors Team
RDS Open Source Databases
Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com