Re: Bug with pg_ctl -w/wait and config-only directories

Alvaro Herrera wrote:
>
> Excerpts from Bruce Momjian's message of lun oct 03 15:23:47 -0300 2011:
> > Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> > > On m?n, 2011-10-03 at 11:27 -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > > > Frankly, I am confused how this breakage has gone unreported for so
> > > > long.
> > >
> > > Well, nobody is required to use pg_ctl, and for the longest time, it was
> > > pg_ctl that was considered to be broken (for various other reasons) and
> > > avoided in packaged init scripts.
> >
> > Yes, but I am now seeing that pg_ctl is really unfixable. Is the
> > config-only directory really a valuable feature if pg_ctl does not work?
> >
> > If we could document that pg_ctl (and pg_upgrade) doesn't work with
> > config-only directories, at least we would have a consistent API. The
> > question is whether the config-only directory is useful with this
> > restriction.
>
> Evidently people that use config-only dirs don't care all that much
> about pg_ctl; we'd have a lot of bugs about it otherwise. But I don't
> think that's the case for pg_upgrade. I think that simply dictating the
> combination of conf-only dirs and pg_upgrade doesn't work is not going
> to be a very popular choice, particularly if there's a simple workaround
> such as adding a symlink. (This makes me wonder, though, we don't we
> require that said symlink is always in place; maybe have postmaster
> create it automatically if it's not present?)
>
> My guess is that we could fix the simple case (the one that doesn't
> involve a "-o datadir" option) with the parse-and-report option that has
> been mentioned, and dictate that the other one doesn't work. That's
> much less likely to cause a problem in practice.

Well, we are unlikely to backpatch that parse-and-report option so it
would be +2 years before it could be expected to work for even
single-major-version upgrades. That just seems unworkable. Yeah. :-(

Yes, auto-creation of symlinks would be useful, but at that point pg_ctl
and pg_upgrade would have to use the real data directory, so I again
wonder what the config-only directory is getting us.

Why were people not using pg_ctl? Because of the limitations which were
fixed in PG 9.1? As Dave already said, windows already has to use pg_ctl.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

+ It's impossible for everything to be true. +