> There are many good reasons for the changes proposed in this thread, but I'm > not sure if discoverability is one. Relying on autocompleting a filename to > figure out existing tooling for database maintenance and DBA type operations > seems like a fragile usecase. > > If commandline discoverability is of importance, providing a summary of the > tools in "man postgresql" seems like a better option.
The first comment in the LWN article: "It's broken and obviously a bad idea but we've been doing it for so long we shouldn't attempt to fix it"
IMO the future is longer than the past, and has more users, so let's do it right instead of perpetuating the mistakes.
I agree we should look at fixing these. However I have two concerns.
1. naming things is surprisingly hard. How sure are we that we can do this right? Can we come up with a correct name for initdb? Maybe pg_createcluster?
2. How long would our deprecation cycle be? 5 years? 10 years? Given that people may need to support multiple versions I would propose no warnings until both formats are supported, then warnings for 2 years, then drop the old ones.
... unless you think PostgreSQL is going to become irrelevant before 2050.