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
