Re: BUG #5329: postmaster fails to start because of an erroneous pg_hba.conf, but doesn't output any error

"Olivier Jeannet" <olivier(dot)jeannet(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> After having modified "pg_hba.conf" in bad way, with the following line (the
> IP address is not used and not wanted) :

> local all all 127.0.0.1 md5

> postmaster was unable to start as usual.

> I had a hard time finding the problem, as nothing is ouput on the command
> line or in the logs.

> I suggest to print something when halting on a configuration file parsing
> problem.

We most certainly do print something --- in your example I get this:

LOG: invalid authentication method "127.0.0.1"
CONTEXT: line 81 of configuration file "/home/postgres/data/pg_hba.conf"
FATAL: could not load pg_hba.conf

I suspect you are using a configuration that redirects the postmaster's
log to /dev/null, or some equally unhelpful place :-(.

FWIW, this message comes out after the logging settings in
postgresql.conf have been adopted, so you should look to those to see
where the message actually went. Errors in postgresql.conf itself
typically get reported on postmaster's stderr.

regards, tom lane