Tom Lane writes:
> *Should* there be a default location established by configure?
Not IMO. Firstly (broken record time), configure should not be used to set
run-time options period. (And there's a single good reason for that: when
users build a package they won't know what options they need later on. I
get really annoyed at packages that do that.) Secondly, this will lead to
all kinds of funny problem reports because everyone will have a different
default. Worse yet, people might not even know what their default is
because they use a binary package. I think the current setup is the
cleanest by far because it emphasizes the independence of the data storage
location and the fact that multiple locations are equally valid.
> I think I'd prefer that to having the dependence on an environment var
Environment variables are a common way of pointing programs to their data.
Personally, I rarely bother with it and start the postmaster with -D
instead, then I know what I'm getting. I suppose there's no reason that
users couldn't do the same. The environment variable is only wildly useful
if people start and stop the server all the time.
--
Peter Eisentraut Sernanders väg 10:115
peter_e@gmx.net 75262 Uppsala
http://yi.org/peter-e/ Sweden