After 87306184580c9c49717, if the postmaster dies without cleaning up (i.e. power outage), running "pg_ctl start" just gives this message and then exits:
pg_ctl: another server might be running Under the old behavior, it would try to start the server anyway, and succeed, then go through recovery and give you back a functional system. >From reading the archive, I can't really tell if this change in behavior was intentional. Anyway it seems like a bad thing to me. Now the user has a system that will not start up, and is given no clue that they need to remove "postmaster.pid" and try again. The behavior here under the new "-I" flag seems no better in this situation. It claims the server is running, when it only "might" be running (and in fact is not running). Cheers, Jeff