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.
