Chris Bitmead <chrisb@nimrod.itg.telstra.com.au> writes:
> What I meant is, would you still be able to create tablespaces on
> systems without symlinks? That would seem to be a desirable feature.
All else being equal, it'd be nice. Since all else is not equal,
exactly how much sweat are we willing to expend on supporting that
feature on such systems --- to the exclusion of other features we
might expend the same sweat on, with more widely useful results?
Bear in mind that everything will still *work* just fine on such a
platform, you just don't have a way to spread the database across
multiple filesystems. That's only an issue if the platform has a
fairly Unixy notion of filesystems ... but no symlinks.
A few messages back someone was opining that we were wasting our time
thinking about tablespaces at all, because any modern platform can
create disk-spanning filesystems for itself, so applications don't have
to worry. I don't buy that argument in general, but I'm quite willing
to quote it for the *very* few systems that are Unixy enough to run
Postgres in the first place, but not quite Unixy enough to have
symlinks.
You gotta draw the line somewhere at what you will support, and
this particular line seems to me to be entirely reasonable and
justifiable. YMMV...
regards, tom lane