Re: USE_LIBXSLT in MSVC builds

Tom Lane wrote:
> Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> writes:
>
>> It's not working on mastodon, and presumably will fail again on baiji.
>>
>
>
>> I notice that mastodon does not appear to have the presumed location of
>> the iconv and xslt DLLs in the PATH it sets. That would be a plausible
>> explanation of the problem ;-)
>>
>
> Ah. If it's just misconfiguration of the buildfarm animals, that would
> also explain the lack of complaints from the field about contrib/xml2
> not working on Windows.
>
Something completely different but a bit alike; today I chased a strange
initdb bug on a rarely used machine. It said something with fgets: some
file error (sorry, history is gone from shell) and then the message that
postgres could not be found in the same path as initdb. But all was
there, permissions etc ok.

In the end it turned out that the fgets error was near the real problem:
postgres was started with -V by initdb and the output read via a pipe.
(function was find_other_exec) But the postgres command failed with an
error that a shared library could not be loaded, however this error
message was not picked up by the pipe read command / error message by
initdb, which maked it hard to diagnose without getting to the debugger.

I don't know if the buildfarm machines fail on initdb, however I think
that maybe a better errormessage at that point in initdb could help
future users.

regards,
Yeb Havinga