Simon Riggs wrote: > Very much agreed. PGDATA is important, lets keep it, please.
To me it's not so much whether or not PGDATA is kept around for the system as a whole so much as how it's used. In the general case, scripts are used to start the postmaster. So using PGDATA even if the postmaster doesn't directly make use of it is a simple matter of adding '-D "$PGDATA"' to the command that invokes the postmaster. The goal here is simply to make it obvious to a system administrator where the PG data directory that a given postmaster is using resides. We can't rely on the mechanism used to change the command string that ps shows for the process: in my experience it's something that often does not work. And in any case, the system administrator will also want to know exactly what options were passed to the postmaster when it was invoked. If there's any group that can figure out how to effortlessly get PGDATA onto the command line of the backend utilities, it's the developer group. :-) In any case, I'm not at all opposed to having the backend stuff know about PGDATA during development, but for production you should have to explicitly specify the data directory on the command line. That seems easy enough to do: #ifdef is your friend. -- Kevin Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match