Re: Installation problem: failed to initialize lc_messages to ""

Stefan Schwarzer <stefan(dot)schwarzer(at)grid(dot)unep(dot)ch> writes:
>> Also, pay attention to the first few lines of initdb output ---
>> it will tell you what it thinks it's supposed to use for locale.

> It tells me the following:

> The files belonging to this database system will be owned by user
> "schwarzer".
> This user must also own the server process.

> The database cluster will be initialized with locale en_US.UTF-8.
> The default database encoding has accordingly been set to UTF8.
> ...
> creating template1 database in /Users/schwarzer/Documents/
> data_postgres/base/1 ... FATAL: XX000: failed to initialize
> lc_messages to ""
> LOCATION: InitializeGUCOptions, guc.c:2666

Hmph. That seems to eliminate the bad-locale-setting theory.

In the past, when we've seen instances of this, it's been either
an improper setting or something missing/broken in the platform's
locale support. I'd have thought OS X was relatively impervious
to this type of problem because it's a monolithic install instead
of package-based, but maybe not. What have you got under
/usr/share/locale? On my OS X 10.4 laptop, I see

g42:~ tgl$ ls -lR /usr/share/locale/en_US.UTF-8
total 40
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 28 Apr 26 2006 LC_COLLATE -> ../la_LN.US-ASCII/LC_COLLATE
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 17 Apr 26 2006 LC_CTYPE -> ../UTF-8/LC_CTYPE
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 Mar 20 2005 LC_MESSAGES
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 30 Apr 26 2006 LC_MONETARY -> ../en_US.ISO8859-1/LC_MONETARY
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 29 Apr 26 2006 LC_NUMERIC -> ../en_US.ISO8859-1/LC_NUMERIC
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 26 Apr 26 2006 LC_TIME -> ../en_US.ISO8859-1/LC_TIME

/usr/share/locale/en_US.UTF-8/LC_MESSAGES:
total 8
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 45 Apr 26 2006 LC_MESSAGES -> ../../en_US.ISO8859-1/LC_MESSAGES/LC_MESSAGES

g42:~ tgl$ ls -lLR /usr/share/locale/en_US.UTF-8
total 200
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 4642 Mar 20 2005 LC_COLLATE
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 80744 Mar 20 2005 LC_CTYPE
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 Mar 20 2005 LC_MESSAGES
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 34 Mar 20 2005 LC_MONETARY
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 8 Mar 20 2005 LC_NUMERIC
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 377 Mar 20 2005 LC_TIME

/usr/share/locale/en_US.UTF-8/LC_MESSAGES:
total 8
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 18 Mar 20 2005 LC_MESSAGES

I'm wondering if some of those files are missing, or the symlinks are
dangling, on yours.

regards, tom lane