Re: The danger of deleting backup_label

Hi David,

Even though I spent a whole bunch of time trying to figure out how to
make concurrent reads of the control file sufficiently atomic for
backups (pg_basebackup and low level filesystem tools), and we
explored multiple avenues with varying results, and finally came up
with something that basically works pretty well... actually I just
hate all of that stuff, and I'm hoping to be able to just withdraw
https://commitfest.postgresql.org/45/4025/ and chalk it all up to
discovery/education and call *this* thread the real outcome of that
preliminary work.

So I'm +1 on the idea of putting a control file image into the backup
label and I'm happy that you're looking into it.

We could just leave the control file out of the base backup
completely, as you said, removing a whole foot-gun. People following
the 'low level' instructions will still get a copy of the control file
from the filesystem, and I don't see any reliable way to poison that
file without also making it so that a crash wouldn't also be prevented
from recovering. I have wondered about putting extra "fingerprint"
information into the control file such as the file's path and inode
number etc, so that you can try to distinguish between a control file
written by PostgreSQL, and a control file copied somewhere else, but
that all feels too fragile, and at the end of the day, people
following the low level backup instructions had better follow the low
level backup instructions (hopefully via the intermediary of an
excellent external backup tool).

As Stephen mentioned[1], we could perhaps also complain if both backup
label and control file exist, and then hint that the user should
remove the *control file* (not the backup label!). I had originally
suggested we would just overwrite the control file, but by explicitly
complaining about it we would also bring the matter to tool/script
authors' attention, ie that they shouldn't be backing that file up, or
should be removing it in a later step if they copy everything. He
also mentions that there doesn't seem to be anything stopping us from
back-patching changes to the backup label contents if we go this way.
I don't have a strong opinion on that and we could leave the question
for later.

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/ZL69NXjCNG%2BWHCqG%40tamriel.snowman.net