Re: drop postmaster symlink

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.

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.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com