Re: executing SELECT xmlelement(name foo); causes "server closed the connection unexpectedly" Error

Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> writes:
> Sushil wrote:
>> *postgres: postgres testdb [local] SELECT: symbol lookup error:
>> postgres: postgres testdb [local] SELECT: undefined symbol:
>> xmlNewTextWriterMemory*

> Your problem appears to be here. Check you libxml installation. Maybe
> someone forgot to export this symbol.

I think it most likely is a corrupted download. Red Hat's normal
release process includes checks for ABI breakage such as disappearing
symbols, so it's hard to believe there's really a problem of that ilk.

The annoying thing about this from a Postgres standpoint is that the
missing symbol results in a runtime crash; a failure at server startup
would be a lot better IMHO. Ideally, shared libraries would be
processed with the equivalent of dlopen(RTLD_NOW). But as far as I
can find we can't easily force that on Linux --- the only available
way to determine it is to set a magic environment variable that the
linker consults.

I could fix this in the RPM distribution by putting export LD_BIND_NOW=1
into the postmaster start script, but I wonder whether there's a better
way.

regards, tom lane