Re: pg_upgrade's bindir options could be optional

Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> writes:
> On lr, 2011-05-07 at 13:33 -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
>> Another
>> interesting approach would be to assume the /bin directory is ../bin
>> from the data directory. That would work for some installs,
>> particularly for people moving things around, but again, it is worth
>> trying to default something that isn't going to be 100% right?

> In practice, there are the two main camps of parallel installation and
> move old installation out of the way. They are probably both pretty big
> (Debias camp 1, Red Hat is camp 2, for a start). So it would be worth
> doing something to help one camp or the other.

It's probably fair to ask whether setting up defaults for this would
actually help either "camp". In the case of the Red Hat RPMs,
pg_upgrade is invoked via a script which is perfectly content to specify
both bindirs explicitly. I doubt I'd remove those options even if I
thought the defaults would be right, because there's just no upside to
doing so. I would imagine the same is true for Debian --- surely this
is pretty mechanized? So the only cases where providing a default is
even theoretically useful are those where someone is invoking pg_upgrade
manually. I suggest that if that's going on, the situation is probably
nonstandard enough that we should have considerable doubt about whether
a default is likely to be correct.

Again, I don't have any particular fear about defaulting --new-bindir.
I *do* have a lot of concern about defaulting --old-bindir.

regards, tom lane