Re: BUG #5674: initdb failed if path contains symlink

Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> writes:
> On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 12:05, Itagaki Takahiro
> <itagaki.takahiro@gmail.com> wrote:
>> The bug might come from the following bug by Microsoft:
>>
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/595553/stat-function-returns-error-for-directory-symbolic-links
>>
>> Note that initdb in 8.4 worked expectedly because it is built with MSVC 2005,
>> but initdb in 9.0 won't work because built with MSVC 2008 :-( .

> Ouch.

> We could work around it in this place (we could specifically ignore
> the "file exists" error on the mkdir call), I guess. But how likely is
> that to bite us elsewhere then?

That cure seems worse than the disease.  We don't have to support
symlinks in the datadir path; we do have to be sure that we're not
overwriting an existing DB.

I think this is a Microsoft bug and it's their problem to fix, not ours.

            regards, tom lane