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

On mån, 2011-10-03 at 17:12 -0400, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> 
> On 10/03/2011 04:41 PM, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> > On mån, 2011-10-03 at 15:09 -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> >> 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.
> > Historically, pg_ctl has had a lot of limitations.  Just off the top of
> > my head, nonstandard ports used to break it, nonstandard socket
> > directories used to break it, nonstandard authentication setups used to
> > break it, the waiting business was unreliable, the stop modes were weird
> > and not flexible enough, the behavior in error cases does not conform to
> > LSB init script conventions, there were some race conditions that I
> > don't recall the details of right now.  And you had to keep a list of
> > exactly which of these bugs were addressed in which version.

> I'm not sure ancient history helps us much here.  Many of these went 
> away long ago.

But some of them are still there.  8.4 is still the packaged version in
some popular Linux distributions, and the fabled fixed-it-all version
9.1 was just released a few weeks ago.  So in current production
environments, pg_ctl is still an occasional liability.

> Our job should be to make it better.

Yeah, don't get me wrong, let's make it better.