Hi,
I have been actively recommending Postgres in my company but had now three
people coming back to me because they couldn't manage to install Postgres on
Windows or MacOS.
The common sympton is always that the installer (the PG installer as well as the
EnterpriseDB installers) suggests to place the datadir into the same directory
as the Postgres binaries (the default for Windows is c:\Program
Files\Postgres\8.3\data).
Now when doing this on Windows this is *bound* to fail because the "Program
Files" are usually not writeable for non-admin users. The directory is created
during installation by the user running the installation (which is usually an
admin user). The PG service runs under a regular user account and thus fails to
write to the data directory. The sympton is that the service simply fails, but
you can't see any errors because PG can't write to the log file as well.
I have never used a Mac but from the description of two of my co-workers it
seems that under MacOS the same is happening.
I would suggest that the installers (PGinstaller _and_ EnterpriseDB) are changed
so that the default for the data directory is /outside/ the Postgres
installation path.
If it's hard to find a good default for the datadir I suggest to leave it
completely empty and actively ask the user to specify a directory and give a big
hint that this directory must be writeable for the postgres user account.
Additionally when creating the data dir from within the installer, it should set
the permissions of that directory to make sure the postgres user can really
write to it.
Most of the people that asked me for help, could distinguish between the
installer and the base product and they didn't "judge the book by its cover",
but there were some comments like "Installing MySQL is a lot easier" (well I
know that it is easier due to lack of security concerns in MySQL, but that
doesn't matter in that discussion)
After all the installer is the first impression a new user gets, and if it's too
complicated he might not even take a second look.
The installer(s) should also ask some question for the default configuration so
that pg_hba.conf and postgres.conf can be pre-configured to e.g. accept
connections from other computers. A simple checkbox during the installation
wizard would be enough for this, which would then adjust listen_address in
postgresql.conf and the host entries in pg_hba.conf
Just to give you guys some impression on how things show up for not-so-advanced
users:
http://www.dbforums.com/postgresql/1640752-installation-wont-work-postgresql.html
So I think with just a little tweaking, the installation experience for those
trying out Postgres could be made a lot better.
Regards
Thomas
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