Re: hba load error and silent mode

Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> writes:
> (Maybe there's a good case for deprecating silent mode.

+1. The only reason to use it is that an init-script writer is too
lazy to deal with things properly --- the thing in question here being
exactly to think of a place for early failure messages to go.

You can *not* just move the syslogger start call up; it's dependent
on having done some of the other initialization steps. (chdir and
signal setup being obvious candidates.) In general, there will always
be messages that come out before the syslogger can start, and thus a
robust setup has got to provide some fallback place for them.

It might be that a reasonable solution on our end would be for
pmdaemonize to point stdout/stderr someplace other than /dev/null,
perhaps "$PGDATA/postmaster.log"? Of course, it's not clear what
we're supposed to do if that open() fails ...

regards, tom lane