Re: [EXT EMAIL] Re: First Time Starting Up PostgreSQL and HavingProblems

On 6/25/19 2:27 AM, Kevin Brannen wrote:
>> From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us
> 
>> Brent Bates <BBates@langleyfcu.org> writes:
>>>       I found the problem.  I cleared everything out and started from scratch, then slowly added my changes back to
theconfiguration files.  The problem was in the postgresql.conf.  At the bottom of the file I had uncommented all the
‘include’lines, so they looked like this:
 
>>>          include_dir = ''                        # include files ending in '.conf' from
> 
>> Ah-hah!  I wonder if we should disallow empty values for these GUCs?
>> And/or put in some kind of test for recursive opening of the same config file?  I don't think it'd occurred to
anyonethat it's this easy to get the code to try to do that.
 
> 
> 
> I would encourage this. 😊 I know on one of my early installs some time back I accidentally did:
> 
> data_directory = ''

 > and had a devil of a time figuring out why the postmaster wouldn't start (in
 > fact it was you Tom that pointed me in the right direction to eventually find
 > the misconfiguration). So I think it would be a great idea to add checks for
 > empty strings in places where that's a problem. An unset value (as in the
 > config is commented out) can be OK as any defaults will be used, but to set
 > some values to the empty string just hurts and it would be a help to new
 > users, or even those of us who make typos, 😊 to get better error messages so
 > we can fix the problem faster on our own

I've submitted fixes for the empty include directives (which are a special case),
I'll see if I can have a look at these ones too.


Regards

Ian Barwick

-- 
  Ian Barwick                   https://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
  PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services