Re: Renaming of pg_xlog and pg_clog

On Fri, Oct 21, 2016 at 10:03 AM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 20, 2016 at 3:46 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> I'm mostly with Stephen on this.  As the names stand, they encourage
>> people to go look at the documentation,
>> https://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/static/storage-file-layout.html
>> which will provide more information than you'd ever get out of any
>> reasonable directory name.
>
> Well, we could change them all to pg_a, pg_b, pg_c, pg_d, ... which
> would encourage that even more strongly.  But I don't think that
> proposal can be taken seriously.  Giving things meaningful names is a
> good practice in almost every case.

Moving on with the topic of this thread... I would think that
"pg_xact" is what we are moving to rename pg_clog.

On top of that, after reading the thread, here are the options and
binaries that could be renamed for consistency with the renaming of
pg_xlog:
- pg_xlogdump -> pg_waldump
- pg_resetxlog -> pg_resetwal
- pg_receivexlog -> pg_receivewal
- initdb --xlogdir -> --waldir
- pg_basebackup --xlogmethod --xlogdir -> --walmethod --waldir
That's quite a number, and each change is trivial. Previous options
would be better kept for backward-compatibility. Personally, I see no
urge in changing all that and I am fine with just renaming the *log
directories of PGDATA for this thread. But as the point has been
raised, here are all things that could be done.
-- 
Michael