Re: [HACKERS] Development installation fails

On 1999-11-24, Tom Lane mentioned:

> > ~/postgres-cur/bin$ ./initdb --pglib=/home/peter/postgres-cur/lib \
> > --pgdata=/home/peter/postgres-cur/data
>
> You may need to have env variables PGDATA and PGLIB set during initdb
> (at least, the install docs recommended that last I looked) and you
> definitely need to have /home/peter/postgres-cur/bin in your PATH.

Okay, thanks for the tip. I thought about this for a while and came to the
conclusion, that this is not only the most likely reason for the oft
criticized installation (non-)simplicity, it is also cumbersome and not
acceptable to have to set environment variables (especially PATH) during
installation. This would also mean that I would have to yank the path away
from my production installation.

So I thunk that initdb could very well find out itself where it is located
and then call ${mydir}/postgres explicitly. That solves the path problem.
Secondly, it could also make educated guesses where the PGLIB is at
(namely ${mydir}/../lib, or ${mydir}/../lib/pgsql as in the RPMs). That
solves the other problem.

I included a patch that does exactly that, so now I can do:
$ ./configure --prefix=/any/path/here
$ make
$ make install
$ /any/path/here/bin/initdb -D /some/other/path #(*)
$ /any/path/here/bin/postmaster -D /some/other/path
and I'm up and running. (No PG* env var or special PATH is set.)

I'm not kidding, this is exactly what I did (well, different path names)
and I'm in business. Okay, there are some other glitches with make install
and initdb being very reluctant to creating directories themselves, but
that could be fixed in another round of changes.

So please examine that patch. It was a very quick hack, so it's not very
refined. Let me know if this sounds good, then I'll put the finishing
touches on it.

-Peter

(*) - Notice that I changed the option to -D (formerly -r). This goes more
nicely with the equivalent postmaster option, and also with "_D_at's where
I want my data to be stored" :)

--
Peter Eisentraut Sernanders väg 10:115
peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net 75262 Uppsala
http://yi.org/peter-e/ Sweden