On 10/03/2011 04:41 PM, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> On mån, 2011-10-03 at 15:09 -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
>> Why were people not using pg_ctl? Because of the limitations which
>> were fixed in PG 9.1? As Dave already said, windows already has to
>> use pg_ctl.
> Historically, pg_ctl has had a lot of limitations. Just off the top of
> my head, nonstandard ports used to break it, nonstandard socket
> directories used to break it, nonstandard authentication setups used to
> break it, the waiting business was unreliable, the stop modes were weird
> and not flexible enough, the behavior in error cases does not conform to
> LSB init script conventions, there were some race conditions that I
> don't recall the details of right now. And you had to keep a list of
> exactly which of these bugs were addressed in which version.
I'm not sure ancient history helps us much here. Many of these went
away long ago.
> Basically, pg_ctl is a neat convenience for interactive use for people
> who don't want to write advanced shell constructs, but for writing a
> robust init script, you can and should do better. For me personally,
> pg_ctl is somewhere between a toy, and annoyance, and a dangerous
> instrument.
>
> Obviously, pg_ctl is now a lot better than when it was started, but
> that's the reason why it is not used in certain places.
>
>
Our job should be to make it better.
cheers
andrew
