Re: [PATCH] Allow Postgres to pick an unused port to listen

On Tue, Apr 11, 2023 at 10:17 PM Yurii Rashkovskii <yrashk(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> I appreciate your support on the pid file concern. What questions do you have about this feature with regard to its desirability and/or implementation? I'd love to learn from your insight and address any of those if I can.

I don't have any particularly specific concerns. But, you know, if a
bunch of other people, especially people already known the community
showed up on this thread to say "hey, I'd like that too" or "that
would be better than what we have now," well then that would make me
think "hey, we should probably move forward with this thing." But so
far the only people to comment are Tom and Andrew. Tom, in addition to
complaining about the PID file thing, also basically said that the
feature didn't seem necessary to him, and Andrew's comments seem to me
to suggest the same thing. So it kind of seems like you've convinced
zero people that this is a thing we should have, and that's not very
many.

It happens from time to time on this mailing list that somebody shows
up to propose a feature where I say to myself "hmm, that doesn't sound
like an intrinsically terrible idea, but it sounds like it might be
specific enough that only the person proposing it would ever use it."
For instance, someone might propose a new backslash command for psql
that runs an SQL query that produces some output which that person
finds useful. There is no big design problem there, but psql is
already pretty cluttered with commands that look like line noise, so
we shouldn't add a new one on the strength of one person wanting it.
Each feature, even if it's minor, has some cost. New releases need to
keep it working, which may mean that it needs a test, and then the
test is another thing that you have to keep working, and it also takes
time to run every time anyone does make check-world. These aren't big
costs and don't set a high bar for adding new features, but they do
mean, at least IMHO, that one person wanting a feature that isn't
obviously of general utility is not good enough. I think all of that
also applies to this feature.

I haven't reviewed the code in detail. It at least has some style
issues, but worrying about that seems premature.

I mostly just wanted to say that I disagreed with Tom about the
particular point on postmaster.pid, without really expressing an
opinion about anything else.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com