PGDATA / data_directory

Hi,

My company is using PGDATA to store configuration files and the guc
data_directory to give the path to the instance directory.

They would use it like this:

pg_ctl start -D <path to CONFDIR> -w

with this directory setup:

<somepath>/CONFDIR => postgresql.conf pg_hba.conf pg_ident.conf
<somepath>/SYSTEM => All the normal stuff in the postgres instance
directory + recovery.conf recovery.done etc...

Is it commonly used ?

Thanks for your help / remarks / feedback.

Benoit.