Re: Unhelpful initdb error message

Thom Brown <thom(at)linux(dot)com> writes:
> thom(at)swift:~/Development$ initdb
> The files belonging to this database system will be owned by user "thom".
> This user must also own the server process.

> The database cluster will be initialized with locale en_GB.UTF-8.
> The default database encoding has accordingly been set to UTF8.
> The default text search configuration will be set to "english".

> fixing permissions on existing directory /home/thom/Development/data ... ok
> creating subdirectories ... ok
> selecting default max_connections ... 10
> selecting default shared_buffers ... 400kB
> creating configuration files ... ok
> creating template1 database in /home/thom/Development/data/base/1 ...
> FATAL: could not remove old lock file "postmaster.pid": No such file
> or directory
> HINT: The file seems accidentally left over, but it could not be
> removed. Please remove the file by hand and try again.
> child process exited with exit code 1
> initdb: removing contents of data directory "/home/thom/Development/data"

Um ... I assume this is some patched version rather than pristine
sources? It's pretty hard to explain why it's falling over like that.

I don't think there is anything wrong with the error message, because
it's intended for the case where some previous postmaster failed and
left a lock file behind. The question is how is it you're getting to
that error, not whether we should change its text.

One possible lead is that it looks like the postmaster-starting probes
to select max_connections and shared_buffers all failed too, since those
numbers came out as the minimums.

regards, tom lane