Re: gitlab post-mortem: pg_basebackup waiting for checkpoint

On Tue, Feb 14, 2017 at 12:06 PM, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> wrote:
> However, outputing this info by default will make it show up in things like
> everybodys cronjobs by default. Right now a successful pg_basebackup run
> will come out with no output at all, which is how most Unix commands work,
> and brings it's own advantages. If we change that people will have to send
> all the output to /dev/null, resulting in missing the things that are
> actually important in any regard.

I agree with that. I think having this show up in verbose mode is a
really good idea - when something just hangs, users don't know what's
going on, and that's bad. But showing it all the time seems like a
bridge too far. As the postmortem linked above shows, people will
think of things like "hey, let's try --verbose mode" when the obvious
thing doesn't work. What is really irritating to them is when
--verbose mode fails to be, uh, verbose.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company