Mark Woodward wrote:
> I'm not sure that I agree. At least in my experience, I wouldn't have more
> than one installation of PostgreSQL in a production machine. It is
> potentially problematic.
>
I agree with you for production environments, but for development, test,
support (and pre-sales) machines there are reasonable requirements for
several.
Even if you have only one installation - something to tell you *where*
the binaries are installed is convenient - as there are quite a few
common locations (e.g. packages installing in /usr or /usr/local, source
builds in /usr/local/pgsql or /opt/pgsql). I've seen many *uncommon*
variants: (e.g. /usr/local/postgresql, /usr/local/postgresql-<version>,
/usr/local/pgsql/<version>, ...).
Admittedly, given that the binaries are likely to be in the
cluster-owners default PATH, it is not as hard to find them as the data
directory. However, this is all about convenience it would seem, since
(for many *nix platforms) two simple searches will give you most of what
is needed:
$ locate postmaster
$ locate pg_hba.conf
Cheers
Mark