Re: [BUGS] BUG #7815: Upgrading PostgreSQL from 9.1 to 9.2 with pg_upgrade/postgreql-setup fails - invalid status retrieve

On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 09:56:48PM -0500, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > (But, at least with the type of packaging I'm using in Fedora, he would
> > first have to go through a package downgrade/reinstallation process,
> > because the packaging provides no simple scripted way of manually
> > starting the old postgres executable, only the new one.  Moreover, what
> > pg_upgrade is printing provides no help in figuring out whether that's
> > the next step.)
> >
> > I do sympathize with taking a paranoid attitude here, but I'm failing
> > to see what advantage there is in not attempting to start the old
> > postmaster.  In the *only* case that pg_upgrade is successfully
> > protecting against with this logic, namely there's-an-active-postmaster-
> > already, the postmaster is equally able to protect itself.  In other
> > cases it would be more helpful not less to let the postmaster analyze
> > the situation.
> >
> > > The other problem is that if the server start fails, how do we know if
> > > the failure was due to a running postmaster?
> >
> > Because we read the postmaster's log file, or at least tell the user to
> > do so.  That report would be unambiguous, unlike pg_upgrade's.
>
> Attached is a WIP patch to give you an idea of how I am going to solve
> this problem.  This comment says it all:

Attached is a ready-to-apply version of the patch.  I continued to use
postmaster.pid to determine if I need to try the start/stop test ---
that allows me to know which servers _might_ be running, because a
server start failure might be for many reasons and I would prefer not to
suggest the server is running if I can avoid it, and the pid file gives
me that.

The patch is longer than I expected because the code needed to be
reordered.  The starting banner indicates if it a live check, but to
check for a live server we need to start/stop the servers and we needed
to know where the binaries are, and we didn't do that until after the
start banner.  I removed the 'check' line for binary checks, and moved
that before the banner printing.  postmaster_start also now needs an
option to supress an error.

--
  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us
  EnterpriseDB                             http://enterprisedb.com

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