Re: postgres --help-config

Tom Lane wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> writes:
> > One thing that seems very strange about the current API are flags that
> > have meaning only when --help-config becomes before it, as with -G and
> > -M.  I have never seen that before,
> 
> postgres -boot does exactly that, and the new code was modeled on it.
> Which doesn't make it good design, maybe, but you can hardly claim
> that there's no precedent.

However, -boot isn't documented because it is only for internal use.
If it was for general use, I doubt it would still use that API.

> We had also considered choosing a different executable name (the
> postmaster-vs-postgres trick).  But on platforms without symlinks,
> like Windows, that would mean an extra whole copy of the backend
> in the installed system, which seemed a bit much just to avoid some
> ugliness in the switch set...

Agreed.

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