I have to agree with Peter E. on this patch: it's poorly thought out.
I don't mind the idea of being able to relocate the socket file,
but the client-side interface they've chosen is silly. Having to
add another switch to every client app is not reasonable --- it's
bad enough that you had to hack every one of the clients we supply,
but what of client apps that just use libpq or one of the other
interface libraries? They'll be unable to talk to such a postmaster
without further work.
We should revert all the client-side changes from this patch, and
instead teach libpq and the other interfaces to treat a host name
that starts with a slash as being a path to a socket file (replacing
the default assumption of "/tmp"). Much cleaner, especially for
existing client apps.
regards, tom lane