Re: drop postmaster symlink

On 1/12/23 12:00, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> On 23.11.22 21:32, Joe Conway wrote:
>>> 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 think it is a problem that one of the most widely used packagings of
> PostgreSQL uses techniques that are directly contradicting the
> PostgreSQL documentation and are also inconsistent with other widely
> used packagings. Users might learn this "trick" but then can't reuse it
> elsewhere, and conversely those who come from other systems might not be
> able to reuse their scripts. That is annoying.
>
>> 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.
>
> This is another such case, where knowledge about selinux configuration
> cannot be transported between Linux distributions.
>
> I almost feel that issues like this make a stronger case for removing
> the postmaster symlink than if it hadn't actually been in use, since the
> removal would serve to unify the landscape for the benefit of users.

To be clear, I am completely in agreement with you about removing the
symlink. I just wanted to be sure Devrim was alerted because I knew he
had a strong opinion on this topic ;-)

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