> But I really seriously feel that this feature is a bad idea as presently
> implemented. If necessary, I'll volunteer to change it the way I think
> it should be (viz, initdb can set up a symlink to a specified xlog
> directory; no change from previous behavior anywhere else).
Neither solution is a particularly good one.
Symlinks seem to break all over the place (windows, novell, os/2),
environment variables are clumsy, arguments are easily forgotten by a
new admin starting up the system manually without reading documentation
first, and postgresql.conf changes are implemented via HUP (which we
don't want -- has to be a full restart?).
I'm going to vote a postgresql.conf entry similar to the LC_ vars thats
initialized by initdb BUT is configurable with a big warning above it
describing what needs to be done when changing it.