On Sun, Apr 12, 2020 at 11:02 AM Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> wrote:
> There's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pg_(Unix).
>
> So it's been removed from posix, but not unlikely to be around. For example, I see it on a server with Debian 9
(Stretch)or Ubuntu 16.04 which is still well in support (but not on a RedHat from the same era).
Well, if it's around on older distros, but not in the newest versions,
I think we should try to lay speedy claim to the name before something
else does, because any other name we pick is going to be longer or
less intuitive or, most likely, both. There's no guarantee that
PostgreSQL 14 would even get packaged for older distros, anyway, or at
least not by the OS provider.
We could also have an alternate name, like pgsql, and make 'pg' a
symlink to it that packagers can choose to omit. (I would prefer pgsql
to pg_ctl, both because I think it's confusing to adopt the name of an
existing tool as the meta-command and also because the underscore
requires pressing two keys at once, which is slightly slower to type).
But there is no way anyone who is a serious user is going to be happy
with a five-character meta-command name that requires six key-presses
to enter (cf. cvs, git, hg, yum, pip, apt, ...).
--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company