Re: Survey: renaming/removing script binaries (createdb, createuser...)

On Wed, 26 Mar 2008, Steve Atkins wrote:

> These were mostly rhetorical suggestions. Not serious in themselves,
> but hoping to make people come clean about why name changes of
> binaries might be needed.

So far I haven't seen anyone besides Zdenek gives a reason why this is
worth the trouble, and that reason has been "Sun's engineers don't like
it".  Now, that alone would be enough to make it a #1 priority if, say,
Sun had just given the PostgreSQL community a billion dollars or
something...

I know I'd be curious to hear what the actual namespace clash concerns are
here, because all this talk worrying about things like "vacuumdb" seems a
bit silly to me--I'm not feeling that one as a likely problem one day.
The create* set are the only examples that seem obviously misleading and
problematic to me.  I've had my own brain fog moments where I typed
createuser when I meant useradd, and vice-versa.

Oh, and everybody should give up on "pg" as a candidate for the universal
command, those letters have been claimed in UNIX land many years ago.
You might as well want "ls".  "pgsql" or "pgcmd" might work; "pgc" is the
shortest thing I can think of that would both make sense (as a short "pg
command") and that isn't used anywhere.

And if anybody suggests putting a "_" in something I have to type all the
time, I will stick my fingers in my ears and start yelling until they
stop.  Bad enough I have to type pg_ctl a few times every day now.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD