Re: [EXT EMAIL] Re: First Time Starting Up PostgreSQL and Having Problems

On 6/25/19 2:27 AM, Kevin Brannen wrote:
>> From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us
>
>> Brent Bates <BBates(at)langleyfcu(dot)org> writes:
>>> I found the problem. I cleared everything out and started from scratch, then slowly added my changes back to the configuration files. The problem was in the postgresql.conf. At the bottom of the file I had uncommented all the ‘include’ lines, so they looked like this:
>>> include_dir = '' # include files ending in '.conf' from
>
>> Ah-hah! I wonder if we should disallow empty values for these GUCs?
>> And/or put in some kind of test for recursive opening of the same config file? I don't think it'd occurred to anyone that it's this easy to get the code to try to do that.
>
>
> I would encourage this. 😊 I know on one of my early installs some time back I accidentally did:
>
> data_directory = ''

> and had a devil of a time figuring out why the postmaster wouldn't start (in
> fact it was you Tom that pointed me in the right direction to eventually find
> the misconfiguration). So I think it would be a great idea to add checks for
> empty strings in places where that's a problem. An unset value (as in the
> config is commented out) can be OK as any defaults will be used, but to set
> some values to the empty string just hurts and it would be a help to new
> users, or even those of us who make typos, 😊 to get better error messages so
> we can fix the problem faster on our own

I've submitted fixes for the empty include directives (which are a special case),
I'll see if I can have a look at these ones too.

Regards

Ian Barwick

--
Ian Barwick https://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services