About the new --maintenance-db options:
Why was this option not added to createuser and dropuser? In the
original discussion[0] they were mentioned, but it apparently never made
it into the code.
I find the name to be unfortunate. For example, I think of running
vacuum as "maintenance". So running vacuumdb --maintenance-db=X would
imply that the vacuum maintenance is done on X. In fact, the whole
point of this option is to find out where the maintenance is to be run,
not to run the maintenance. Maybe something like --initial-db would be
better?
What is the purpose of these options? The initial discussion was
unclear on this. The documentation contains no explanation of why they
should be used. If we want to really support the case where both
postgres and template1 are removed, an environment variable might be
more useful than requiring this to be typed out for every command.
[0]: http://archives.postgresql.org/message-id/CA+TgmoaCjWSiS9nNqJGAamL1vg6C8B6O1nDgqnUCa2Gm00dNfg@mail.gmail.com