Re: fsync-pgdata-on-recovery tries to write to more files than previously

Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> writes:
> On 2015-05-29 13:14:18 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Abhijit Menon-Sen <ams(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com> writes:
>> As I mentioned yesterday, I'm not really on board with ignoring EACCES,
>> except for the directories-on-Windows case. Since we're only logging
>> the failures anyway, I think it is reasonable to log a complaint for any
>> unwritable file in the data directory.

> That sounds like a potentially nontrivial amount of repetitive log bleat
> after every crash start? One which the user can't really stop?

Why can't the user stop it? We won't be bleating about the case of a
symlink to a non-writable file someplace else, which is the Debian use
case. I don't see a very good excuse to have a non-writable file right
in the data directory.

>> Also I want to get rid of the ETXTBSY special cases. That one doesn't
>> seem like something that we should silently ignore: what the heck are
>> executables doing in the data directory? Or is there some other meaning
>> on Windows?

> I've seen a bunch of binaries placed in the data directory as
> archive/restore commands. Those will be busy a good amount of the
> time. While it'd not be my choice to do that, it's not entirely
> unreasonable.

I'd say it's a pretty damn-fool arrangement: for starters, it's
an unnecessary security hazard.

In any case, if the cost of such a file is one more line of log output
during a crash restart, most people would have no problem at all in
ignoring that log output.

regards, tom lane