Re: gitlab post-mortem: pg_basebackup waiting for checkpoint

Robert Haas wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 14, 2017 at 12:06 PM, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> wrote:
> > However, outputing this info by default will make it show up in things like
> > everybodys cronjobs by default. Right now a successful pg_basebackup run
> > will come out with no output at all, which is how most Unix commands work,
> > and brings it's own advantages. If we change that people will have to send
> > all the output to /dev/null, resulting in missing the things that are
> > actually important in any regard.
>
> I agree with that. I think having this show up in verbose mode is a
> really good idea - when something just hangs, users don't know what's
> going on, and that's bad. But showing it all the time seems like a
> bridge too far. As the postmortem linked above shows, people will
> think of things like "hey, let's try --verbose mode" when the obvious
> thing doesn't work. What is really irritating to them is when
> --verbose mode fails to be, uh, verbose.

I'd rather have a --quiet mode instead. If you're running it by hand,
you're likely to omit the switch, whereas when writing the cron job
you're going to notice lack of switch even before you let the job run
once.

I think progress reporting ought to go to stderr anyway.

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