Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> writes:
> One thing that seems very strange about the current API are flags that
> have meaning only when --help-config becomes before it, as with -G and
> -M. I have never seen that before,
postgres -boot does exactly that, and the new code was modeled on it.
Which doesn't make it good design, maybe, but you can hardly claim
that there's no precedent.
We had also considered choosing a different executable name (the
postmaster-vs-postgres trick). But on platforms without symlinks,
like Windows, that would mean an extra whole copy of the backend
in the installed system, which seemed a bit much just to avoid some
ugliness in the switch set...
regards, tom lane