Re: initdb -S and tablespaces

Abhijit Menon-Sen wrote:

Hi,

> At 2015-04-03 13:32:32 -0300, alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com wrote:

> > I also noticed that walkdir() thinks it is completely agnostic on
> > what the passed action is; except that the comment at the bottom talks
> > about how fsync on directories is important, which seems out of place.
>
> Yes. The function behaves as documented, but the comment is clearly too
> specific. I'm not sure where to put it. I could make walkdir() NOT do
> it, and instead do it in the caller with the same comment. Thoughts?

I think it's enough to state in the function comment that the action is
applied to the top element too. Maybe add the fsync comment on the
callsite.

> > Hmm ... Actually, since surely we must follow symlinks everywhere,
> > why do we have to do this separately for pg_tblspc? Shouldn't that
> > link-following occur automatically when walking PGDATA in the first
> > place?
>
> I'm not sure about that (and that's why I've not attached an updated
> patch here). The original idea was to follow only those links that we
> expect to be in PGDATA.
>
> I suppose it would be easier in terms of the code to follow all links,
> but I don't know if it's the right thing. If that's what you think we
> should do, I can post a simplified patch.

Well, we have many things that can be set as symlinks; some you can have
initdb create the links for you (initdb --xlogdir), others you can move
manually. I think not following all links might lead to impossible-to-
detect bugs such as failing to fsync new pgdata subdirectories we add in
the future, for example.

--
Álvaro Herrera http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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