Re: Idea: closing the loop for "pg_ctl reload"

On 3/3/15 11:15 AM, Jan de Visser wrote:
> On March 3, 2015 11:09:29 AM Jim Nasby wrote:
>> On 3/3/15 9:26 AM, Andres Freund wrote:
>>> On 2015-03-03 15:21:24 +0000, Greg Stark wrote:
>>>> Fwiw this concerns me slightly. I'm sure a lot of people are doing
>>>> things like "kill -HUP `cat .../postmaster.pid`" or the equivalent.
>>>
>>> postmaster.pid already contains considerably more than just the pid. e.g.
>>> 4071
>>> /srv/dev/pgdev-master
>>> 1425396089
>>> 5440
>>> /tmp
>>> localhost
>>>
>>>     5440001  82345992
>>
>> If we already have all this extra stuff, why not include an actual error
>> message then, or at least the first line of an error (or maybe just swap
>> any newlines with spaces)?
>
> Not impossible. I can play around with that and see if it's as straightforward
> as I think it is.

I'm sure the code side of this is trivial; it's a question of why Tom 
was objecting. It would probably be better for us to come to a 
conclusion before working on this.

On a related note... something else we could do here would be to keep a 
last-known-good copy of the config files around. That way if you flubbed 
something at least the server would still start. I do think that any 
admin worth anything would notice an error from pg_ctl, but maybe others 
have a different opinion.
-- 
Jim Nasby, Data Architect, Blue Treble Consulting
Data in Trouble? Get it in Treble! http://BlueTreble.com