Re: Prevent printing "next step instructions" in initdb and pg_upgrade

On 2020-11-24 13:32, Magnus Hagander wrote:
> I think it boils down to that today the output from initdb is entirely
> geared towards people running initdb directly and starting their
> server manually, and very few people outside the actual PostgreSQL
> developers ever do that. But there are still a lot of people who run
> initdb through their wrapper manually (for redhat you have to do that,
> for debian you only have to do it if you're creating a secondary
> cluster but that still a pretty common operation).

Perhaps it's worth asking whom the advice applies to then.  You suggest 
it's mostly developers.  I for one am still grumpy that in 9.5 we 
removed the variant of the hint that suggested "postgres -D ..." instead 
of pg_ctl.  I used to copy and paste that a lot.  The argument back then 
was that the hint should target end users, not developers.  I doubt that 
under the current circumstances, running pg_ctl start from the console 
is really appropriate advice for a majority of users.  (For one thing, 
systemd will kill it when you log out.)  I don't know what better advice 
would be, though.  Maybe we need to add some kind of text adventure game 
into initdb.

-- 
Peter Eisentraut
2ndQuadrant, an EDB company
https://www.2ndquadrant.com/