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'.
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.
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.
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.
I should add that I am an accolyte of Postgres and am only raising
this (possible) issue in the most positive spirit I am capable of. In
addition, I think that the people on this list are superb, and the
responses are unbelievably helpful and accurate.
John
On Apr 2, 2010, at 8:29 AM, John R Pierce wrote:
> John Gage wrote:
>> The 8.4.2 documentation says:
>>
>> "The default user name is your Unix user name, as is the default
>> database name."
>
> when you as a user connect to the database server the commands like
> psql, pg_dump, etc all use your unix username as the default for the
> database username, and your username as teh default for the database
> name, unless you specify a different user and/or database on hte
> command line.
>
>