Symlinks would be great, because then the symlinks could be packaged as an optional package. such as; - postgresql-11 - postgresql-client-11 - postgresql-client-symlinks-11 - postgresql-client-common - postgresql-common
Then one might chose to not install the symlinks package or uninstall it. And it would ease discoverability, predictability, intuitiveness, and ease-of-use so much by just being able to type pg_<tab> to discover all the PostgreSQL-related commands. On Wed, Mar 27, 2019 at 6:26 PM Petr Jelinek <petr.jeli...@2ndquadrant.com> wrote: > > On 27/03/2019 15:26, Tomas Vondra wrote: > > On Wed, Mar 27, 2019 at 03:07:24PM +0100, Andreas Karlsson wrote: > >> On 3/27/19 2:51 PM, Tomas Vondra wrote: > >>> I think the consensus in this thread (and the previous ancient ones) is > >>> that it's not worth it. It's one thing to introduce new commands with > >>> the > >>> pg_ prefix, and it's a completely different thing to rename existing > >>> ones. > >>> That has inherent costs, and as Tom pointed out the burden would fall on > >>> people using PostgreSQL (and that's rather undesirable). > >>> > >>> I personally don't see why having commands without pg_ prefix would be > >>> an issue. Especially when placed in a separate directory, which > >>> eliminates > >>> the possibility of conflict with other commands. > >> > >> I buy that it may not be worth breaking tens of thousands of scripts > >> to fix this, but I disagree about it not being an issue. Most Linux > >> distributions add PostgreSQL's executables in to a directory which is > >> in the default $PATH (/usr/bin in the case of Debian). And even if it > >> would be installed into a separate directory there would still be a > >> conflict as soon as that directory is added to $PATH. > >> > > > > That is true, of course. > > It's only partially true, for example on my systems: > > Debian/Ubuntu: > $ readlink -f /usr/bin/createuser > /usr/share/postgresql-common/pg_wrapper > > Centos (PGDG package): > readlink -f /usr/bin/createdb > /usr/pgsql-11/bin/createdb > > This also means that the idea about symlinks is something packages > already do. > > -- > Petr Jelinek http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/ > PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services