[Pkg-postgresql-public] Bug#891687: postgresql-common: dsfwew

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

Hi Christoph--

On Fri 2018-03-02 14:00:52 +0100, Christoph Berg wrote:
> this is very interesting, especially Type=notify.

thanks for taking a look!

> my first question would be if we could integrate the idea more tightly
> with the existing postgresql@ services which are already capable of
> launching clusters for different users (though currently hardcoded to
> /etc/postgresql/*). The cluster machinery itself (pg_ctlcluster and
> friends) can operate on different roots if PG_CLUSTER_CONF_ROOT is
> set. Maybe that can be incorporated to work better together.

i confess i don't understand the existing cluster machinery in debian as
well as i understand the upstream binaries -- so my changes were focused
specifically on setting up a simple per-user arrangement which:

 a) doesn't require any superuser interaction, and

 b) doesn't require us to think about any upgrade paths from previous
    versions ;)

> One thing I have been thinking about was to replace pg_ctlcluster with
> something more systemd-specific, including Type=notify operation. This
> looks about what you have here.

yep, Type=notify Just Works™ afaict with the currently-shipped postgres.
it'd be great to have that used for the system stuff as well, but i
haven't thought through the upgrade paths clearly yet.

one additional fix to make things even nicer would be to make the
cluster daemon fully socket-activated, but that's likely to be work for
upstream, so we don't need to discuss it here.

anyway, let me know if there are things i can do that would make you
feel more comfortable adopting this user-specific cluster management
idea.  users can already do it, but it'd be nice to smooth out bumps in
the road for them a little bit with a sensibly-maintained minimal
interface for the simple use case.

        --dkg