Re: [BUGS] BUG #5305: Postgres service stops when closing Windows session

On Thu, Sep 9, 2010 at 3:00 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>> On Thu, Sep 9, 2010 at 2:23 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>>> We're not so worried about this case that we'd want to backport the
>>> deadman switch into 8.3 or 8.2 to have a fix there, are we?
>
>> I think we should consider backporting the deadman switch to 8.3 and 8.2.
>
> [ raised eyebrow... ]  Weren't you the one just lecturing me about
> minimizing changes in back branches?

They call me Professor Haas?

I believe the specific nature of my complaint was that we should only
back-patch important bug or security fixes. I think that there is
credible argument that unnecessary database PANICs fall into that
category and wonky whitespace in the ps output does not. YMMV, of
course.

> That was a fairly large patch, and I *don't* want to back-port it.
> The thrust of my question was more along the lines of whether we should
> look for a different solution to the current problem, so that we would
> have something that could be back-ported into 8.2 and 8.3.  Personally
> I'm satisfied with only fixing it in 8.4 and up, but then again I don't
> use Windows.

I'm a bit surprised that you don't think this is back-patchable
material, considering the last paragraph of the commit message, which
seems to imply that you at least gave the matter some brief
consideration before deciding against it:

Although this problem is of long standing, the lack of field complaints
seems to mean it's not critical enough to risk back-patching; at least
not till we get some more testing of this mechanism.

We certainly now have MANY documented field complaints at least of the
exit-128-on-Windows problem, if not the more general
backend-exits-without-going-through-the-normal-cleanup-path problem.
Having said that, I'd be just as happy to go back to Magnus's original
solution, which didn't depend on the dead-man switch anyway.

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