Why is failure to find file a "NOTICE"?

When I start the postmaster with PGDATA a relative path[*], then I
reproducably get things like this:

DEBUG: Data Base System is in production state at Thu Nov 2 20:28:26 2000
NOTICE: Cannot create init file pg-install/var/data/base/1/pg_internal.init.10037: No such file or directory
Continuing anyway, but there's something wrong.
NOTICE: mdopen: couldn't open pg-install/var/data/global/1269: No such file or directory
NOTICE: mdopen: couldn't open pg-install/var/data/global/1264: No such file or directory
NOTICE: mdopen: couldn't open pg-install/var/data/global/1269: No such file or directory
FATAL 1: cannot open relation pg_log
NOTICE: Cannot create init file pg-install/var/data/base/1/pg_internal.init.10053: No such file or directory
Continuing anyway, but there's something wrong.
NOTICE: mdopen: couldn't open pg-install/var/data/global/1269: No such file or directory
NOTICE: mdopen: couldn't open pg-install/var/data/global/1264: No such file or directory

(hangs here, and then after a while)

FATAL: s_lock(40017029) at spin.c:131, stuck spinlock. Aborting.

FATAL: s_lock(40017029) at spin.c:131, stuck spinlock. Aborting.
Server process (pid 10053) exited with status 6 at Thu Nov 2 20:29:54 2000
Terminating any active server processes...
Server processes were terminated at Thu Nov 2 20:29:54 2000
Reinitializing shared memory and semaphores

It seems to me that "Continuing anyway, but there's something wrong." is a
rather inappropriate error handling, and this whole things seems pretty
scary for a trivial user mistake.

[*] -- The postmaster should refuse to start when the data directory is
not an absolute path. I'm on that.

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net http://yi.org/peter-e/