Thomas Swan <tswan@idigx.com> writes:
> Bruce Momjian wrote:
>> The advantage of symlinks is that an administrator could see how things
>> are laid out from the command line.
>>
> That's a poor reason to require symlinks. The administrator can just as
> easily open up psql and query pg_tablespace to see that same
> information.
Something to keep in mind here is that one of the times you would most
likely need that information is when the database is broken and you
*can't* simply "open up psql" and inspect system catalogs. I like the
fact that a symlink implementation can be inspected without depending on
a working database.
If we were going to build a non-symlink implementation, I'd want the
highlevel-to-lowlevel data transfer to take the form of a flat ASCII
file that could be inspected by hand, rather than some hidden in-memory
datastructure. But given the previous discussion in this thread,
I cannot see any strong reason not to rely on symlinks for the purpose.
We are not in the business of building replacements for OS features.
regards, tom lane