Re: pg_ctl kill support for KILL signal was Re: [COMMITTERS] pgsql: Add test for postmaster crash restarts.

On 10/01/2017 04:48 PM, Andres Freund wrote:
> On 2017-10-01 16:42:44 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Andrew Dunstan <andrew(dot)dunstan(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
>>> On 09/30/2017 10:32 PM, Andres Freund wrote:
>>>> Heh. I'm inclined to take it out. We could add a --use-the-force-luke
>>>> type parameter, but it doesn't seem worth it.
>>> I agree, but I think we need this discussed on -hackers. Does anyone
>>> have an objection to allowing "pg_ctl kill KILL somepid"? As Andres
>>> points out, in most places you can just call kill from the command line
>>> anyway, so disallowing it is not really a security feature. Having it
>>> would let us have portable crash restart tests.
>> +1 for portable tests, but it still seems like something we don't want
>> to encourage users to use. What do you think of leaving it out of the
>> documentation?
> As far as I can tell we've not documented the set of acceptable signals
> anywhere but the source. I think we can just keep it that way?

As documented it's in the help text:

printf(_("\nAllowed signal names for kill:\n"));
printf("  ABRT HUP INT QUIT TERM USR1 USR2\n");

So we can leave it out of there. OTOH I'm not a huge fan of security by
obscurity. I guess this wouldn't be too bad a case.

cheers

andrew

--

Andrew Dunstan https://www.2ndQuadrant.com
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services