Hi,
Looks like I should get to know the "Filesystem Hierarchy Standard" atleast a little better.
The RPM distributions of PG use /var/lib/pgsql/data as the standard PGDATA value. I'm not sure what Debian does but I think it might be different. Also there has been some talk of including the major release number (7.4, 8.0, etc) in the standard PGDATA value, to ease migration across server versions by allowing different versions to be installed concurrently.
Oh, this would be excellent! The fear of dealing with 2 different versions and the fear of overwriting something by mistake is what's keeping me from upgrading my PG installation.
This is partly my concern also. It's only a concern for me because I don't have any direct experience of managing and upgrading production systems using packages, I have always used the source code download. Backing up your databases before an upgrade is always advisable, but on the other hand, we typically don't want to have to endure a restore just because we messed up a minor upgrade. if you are building from source it's no problem as you just don't run initdb. As to package upgrades, presumably they don't touch your data. I have to write a manual for the maintenance and updating of the server, so I'm gonna have to test it all anyway.
Getting back to my original question (as I think it was) I havn't seen any reason not to use the default data directory used by the package, especially if it conforms with the above mentioned standard.
Regards
Iain
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