Re: Debugging initdb breakage

Excerpts from Dimitri Fontaine's message of dom oct 10 17:38:01 -0300 2010:
> Hi,
>
> So I'm beginning to work on the extension support for dump and restore,
> and that begins with a new pg_extension catalog. I managed to break
> initdb already, of course, but I'm fighting my way out — no luck with
> gdb, it won't catch the Assert failure and show me a backtrace. I tried
> "set follow-fork-mode child" in gdb, in different systems, to no avail.

As a note, I've had luck finding bootstrap-time bugs by manually feeding
the bootstrapping commands into bootstrap mode, with a leftover dir from
"initdb --noclean". This has helped a few times that there has been no
PANIC but just a FATAL or ERROR, for example. It's easy to attach GDB
to such a backend.

--
Álvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com>
The PostgreSQL Company - Command Prompt, Inc.
PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Development, 24x7 support