Re: [PATCHES] Bug in WAL backup documentation

Bernd Helmle <mailings@oopsware.de> writes:
> Our WAL backup documentation says in some parts of it:

> ..."%p is replaced by the absolute path of the file to archive..." [1]

> I think this is (at least for 8.1 and upcoming 8.2 releases) wrong, since
> the archiver replaces this with pg_xlog/<LOGFILENAME> only,

Good point.  Do we want to consider that this is a code bug rather than
a doc bug?  The relative path is more efficient as long as the archiver
script doesn't do a "cd", but if it does then there'd be a problem.
You could argue that the code should be tweaked to continue supplying
an absolute path.

Since 8.1 has done this all along and no one's actually complained about
it, I guess no one is using scripts that do "cd".  I'm inclined to go
with Bernd's suggestion to change the docs to match the code, but does
anyone have a contrary opinion?

            regards, tom lane