Re: ClosePipeStream failure ignored in pg_import_system_collations

Mark Dilger <hornschnorter(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> On Thu, May 23, 2019 at 3:23 PM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> The concrete case where that's an issue, I think, is that "locale -a"
>> fails, possibly after outputting a few locale names. The only report
>> we get about that is a failure indication from ClosePipeStream.
>> As things stand we just silently push on, creating no or a few collations.
>> With a check, we'd error out ... causing initdb to fail altogether.
>> Maybe that's an overreaction; I'm not sure. Perhaps the right
>> thing is just to issue a warning? But ignoring it completely
>> seems bad.

> Another option is to retry the "locale -a" call, perhaps after sleeping
> a short while, but I have no idea how likely a second (or third...) call
> to "locale -a" is to succeed if the prior call failed, mostly because I
> don't have a clear idea why it would fail the first time.

I doubt that retrying would be of any value; in a resource-exhaustion
situation you might as well just redo the whole initdb. The main case
I can think of where you'd get a hard failure is "/usr/bin/locale not
installed". I have no idea whether there are any platforms where that
would be a likely situation. On my Linux machines it seems to be part of
glibc-common, so there's basically 0 chance ... but I can imagine that
other platforms with a more stripped-down mentality might allow it to
not be present.

regards, tom lane