Re: Unhelpful initdb error message

On 6 March 2012 17:46, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Thom Brown <thom(at)linux(dot)com> writes:
>> On 6 March 2012 16:31, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>>> [ scratches head... ]  I can't reproduce it with current git tip.
>
>> And I don't think I can reproduce this if I remove that directory.
>> I've seen this issue about 3 or 4 times in the past, and fixed it by
>> ditching the old data dir completely.  I'm just not sure what causes
>> this to happen.
>
> I'm a bit confused here.  Isn't the data directory totally empty before
> initdb starts?  It's supposed to refuse to proceed otherwise.

Yes, it is completely empty:

thom(at)swift:~/Development$ ls -la data
total 8
drwx------ 2 thom thom 4096 2012-03-06 17:48 .
drwxrwxr-x 15 thom thom 4096 2012-03-06 17:46 ..

--
Thom