Re: pg_ctl non-idempotent behavior change

On Mon, Aug  4, 2014 at 05:07:47PM -0400, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> Tom Lane wrote:
> > Jeff Janes <jeff.janes@gmail.com> writes:
> > > After 87306184580c9c49717, if the postmaster dies without cleaning up (i.e.
> > > power outage), running "pg_ctl start" just gives this message and then
> > > exits:
> > 
> > > pg_ctl: another server might be running
> > 
> > > Under the old behavior, it would try to start the server anyway, and
> > > succeed, then go through recovery and give you back a functional system.
> > 
> > > From reading the archive, I can't really tell if this change in behavior
> > > was intentional.
> > 
> > Hmm.  I rather thought we had agreed not to change the default behavior,
> > but the commit message fairly clearly says that the default behavior is
> > being changed.  This case shows that that change was inadequately
> > thought through.
> > 
> > > Anyway it seems like a bad thing to me.  Now the user has a system that
> > > will not start up, and is given no clue that they need to remove
> > > "postmaster.pid" and try again.
> > 
> > Yeah, this is not tolerable.  We could think about improving the logic
> > to have a stronger check on whether the old server is really there or
> > not (ie it should be doing something more like pg_ping and less like
> > just checking if the pidfile is there).  But given how close we are to
> > beta, maybe the best thing is to revert that change for now and put it
> > back on the to-think-about-for-9.4 list.  Peter?
> 
> Are we going to unrevert this patch for 9.5?

Seems no one is thinking of restoring this patch and working on the
issue.

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