Re: PostgreSQL pollutes the file system

On Wed, Mar 27, 2019 at 03:07:24PM +0100, Andreas Karlsson wrote:
>On 3/27/19 2:51 PM, Tomas Vondra wrote:
>>I think the consensus in this thread (and the previous ancient ones) is
>>that it's not worth it. It's one thing to introduce new commands with the
>>pg_ prefix, and it's a completely different thing to rename existing ones.
>>That has inherent costs, and as Tom pointed out the burden would fall on
>>people using PostgreSQL (and that's rather undesirable).
>>
>>I personally don't see why having commands without pg_ prefix would be
>>an issue. Especially when placed in a separate directory, which eliminates
>>the possibility of conflict with other commands.
>
>I buy that it may not be worth breaking tens of thousands of scripts 
>to fix this, but I disagree about it not being an issue. Most Linux 
>distributions add PostgreSQL's executables in to a directory which is 
>in the default $PATH (/usr/bin in the case of Debian). And even if it 
>would be installed into a separate directory there would still be a 
>conflict as soon as that directory is added to $PATH.
>

That is true, of course. But are there actual examples of such conflicts
in practice? I mean, are there tools/packages that provide commands with
a conflicting name? I'm not aware of any, and as was pointed before, we'd
have ~20 years of history on any new ones.

>And I think that it is also relatively easy to confuse adduser and 
>createuser when reading a script. Nothing about the name createuser 
>indicates that it will create a role in an SQL database.
>

Sure, and I've confused those tools too in the past. But that's not
something you'll hit in a script, at least not if you test it before
running it on production system. And if you're running untested scripts,
this is likely the least of your problems ...

cheers

-- 
Tomas Vondra                  http://www.2ndQuadrant.com
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services