Re: PostgreSQL pollutes the file system

On 3/27/19 2:51 PM, Tomas Vondra wrote:
> I think the consensus in this thread (and the previous ancient ones) is
> that it's not worth it. It's one thing to introduce new commands with the
> pg_ prefix, and it's a completely different thing to rename existing ones.
> That has inherent costs, and as Tom pointed out the burden would fall on
> people using PostgreSQL (and that's rather undesirable).
> 
> I personally don't see why having commands without pg_ prefix would be
> an issue. Especially when placed in a separate directory, which eliminates
> the possibility of conflict with other commands.

I buy that it may not be worth breaking tens of thousands of scripts to 
fix this, but I disagree about it not being an issue. Most Linux 
distributions add PostgreSQL's executables in to a directory which is in 
the default $PATH (/usr/bin in the case of Debian). And even if it would 
be installed into a separate directory there would still be a conflict 
as soon as that directory is added to $PATH.

And I think that it is also relatively easy to confuse adduser and 
createuser when reading a script. Nothing about the name createuser 
indicates that it will create a role in an SQL database.

Andreas