Re: pg_basebackup: could not get transaction log end position from server: FATAL: could not open file "./pg_hba.conf~": Permission denied

On 2014-05-16 08:13:04 -0700, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> On 05/16/2014 07:30 AM, Andres Freund wrote:
> >
> >Hi,
> >
> >On 2014-05-16 07:28:42 -0700, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> >>Can we get that fixed please? It seems rather bad behavior for pg_basebackup
> >>to fatal out because of the permissions on a backup file of all things.
> >>Instead, we should do WARNING and say skipped.
> >
> >Doesn't sound like a good idea to me. We'd need to have a catalog of
> >common unimportant fileendings and such. We surely *do* want to error
> >out when we fail to copy an important file.they
> >
>
> pg_hba.conf~ is not an important file.

Where do we know that from?

> We know what files are important, especially in $PGDATA, they aren't
> variable, so why is pg_basebackup failing on a file it should know or care
> nothing about?

No, we don't necessarily. It'd e.g. bad to succeed if postgresql.conf
includes another file and we fail when backing that up even though it's
in the data directory.
But even otherwise it'd be a non-neglegible amount of code to enumerate
possibly important files (which wouldn't fully reliable. We can't access
the catalogs). Code that's only there to work around a user doing
something bad that's trivially fixable. Nah.

Greetings,

Andres Freund

--
Andres Freund http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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