Re: Re: BUG #5065: pg_ctl start fails as administrator, with "could not locate matching postgres executable"

Dave Page wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 7:03 PM, Jesse Morris <jmorris@coverity.com> wrote:
>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Dave Page [mailto:dpage@pgadmin.org]
>>> Sent: Friday, October 16, 2009 2:14 AM
>>> To: Jesse Morris
>>> Cc: pgsql-bugs@postgresql.org
>>> Subject: Re: [BUGS] Re: BUG #5065: pg_ctl start fails as
>>>
>> administrator,
>>
>>> with "could not locate matching postgres executable"
>>>
>>>
>>>> The patch:
>>>>
>>>> ------begin patch------
>>>>
>>> :-(. Unfortunately inlining the patch in the email has munged it
>>> beyond usability. Can you resend it as an attachment please?
>>>
>> Oops!  Re-sent, as an attachment.
>>
>
> Thanks. I've had a play with this, and it seems to work fine in 8.4.1
> - at least, it doesn't seem to cause any regression that I can see
> when testing in Vista or XP. I cannot reproduce the problem since I
> wrote the original fix though, so I cannot confirm that this fixes any
> new cases; we'll have to take your word for that :-)
>
> The code around this has changed a little on -head. I don't have any
> more spare cycles at the moment - are you able to produce an updated
> patch for 8.5?
>
> Andrew/Magnus; we do still see occasional failures of this nature, so
> I believe there is still an issue here. Can we look at getting this
> backpatched for 8.3.whatever and 8.4.2, assuming it looks good to you
> as well?
>
>

It looks OK to me (modulo the incorrect changing of "its" to "it's" in a
comment - whoever did that was trying to make it consistent, but
unfortunately made it consistently wrong).

However, I'd like a bit more comment added on just why doing this is
safe. Would it still be safe if someone granted some dangerous privilege
directly to the Administrator user, if that's possible?

cheers

andrew