John Gage wrote:
> Then I don't understand why the installer doesn't do the same thing.
>
> Or, in the alternative, why it doesn't ask you what you want these
> parameters to be.
>
> I would say that, typically, someone installing postgres does it,
> conceivably, as root or, more likely, as a user.
>
> What he or she doesn't do is install it as user 'postgres'.
>
but, thats exactly how most all data base servers operate. the server
daemon run as their own private user. Oracle runs under whatever DBA
account you configure it to run as (usually the user 'oracle').
Microsoft installs SQL Server's services with its own user account.
Apache HTTP is generally run as http or apache or webuser on unix
systems, not as one of the regular interactive users. etc etc.
> Yet, that is what the one-click installer does. I do not believe that
> this is intuitive. What is more, gratuitiously adding a user to the
> system doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense.
>
maybe the documentation needs some more explanations, then.
> In addition, all other one-click installations on the Mac either don't
> ask for root privileges, because they don't need them, or ask for
> them, but still install under the current user. Some installations
> will even ask whether you want the application usable by all users of
> the machine or just you.
>
so on a mac, any server daemons you install run with your user
credentials? really?
> But none, repeat none, create a new user.
>
> What is more, through standard unix commands such as "who" or "cat
> /etc/passwd", I cannot find the user 'postgres' on my machine...even
> though he is the owner of the Postgres data files...on my machine.
>
> There's the rub. 'postgres' owns files...my files...on my machine,
> yet he is not on my machine. Not good.
thats not even possible unless the macos doesn't use /etc/passwd as its
user database. I dunno much about macosx, but everything I hear about
it sounds like they took unix and twisted it all around.