WARNING: could not open statistics file "pg_stat_tmp/global.stat": Operation not permitted

This is an issue when PostgreSQL is running inside a container. In my quest to find an answer, I’ve discovered three instances that it has come up and various people have talked about fixes but no one seemed to notice what I found.

I opened an issue here[1].

From within the container, files which I assume are created by PostgreSQL are ending up being owned by root rather than Postgres. Thus, to me, it appears to NOT be an issue of mapping internal UIDs and GIDs to external IDs since there should not be anything outside the PostgreSQL container creating files inside Postgres’ data directory.

The reason I’m sending this note to the general list is to ask how bad is this error? Some “solutions” are to make the pg_stat_tmp directory internal to the image and that somehow resolves the issue but I don’t think anyone really understands why and things like that bother me. But I’m also curious if that appears to be a viable solution. The result will be that when the Postgres is stopped and the container exited, the next time Postgres starts back up, the pg_stat_tmp directory will be gone. Is that ok? Does Postgres store anything that that needs to survive a restart?

Thank you for your help,
Perry
[1] https://github.com/docker-library/docs/issues/2188#issue-1367170047 <https://github.com/docker-library/docs/issues/2188#issue-1367170047>