Hi Postgres Devs, I had a suggestion regarding the output pg_ctl gives when you use it to start the postgres server. At first I was going to write a patch, but then I decided to just ask you guys first to see what you think.
I had an issue earlier where I was trying to upgrade my postgres database to a new major version and incidentally a new pg_catalog version, and therefore the new code could no longer run the existing data directory without pg_upgrade or pg_dump (I ended up needing pg_dump). Initially I was very confused because I tried running "pg_ctl -D datadir -l logfile start" like normal, and it just said "server starting", yet the server was not starting. It took me a while to realize that I needed to use the "--wait" / "-w" option to actually wait and test whether the server was really starting, at which point it told me there was a problem and to check the log. I'm concerned some new users may not understand this behavior of pg_ctl, so I wanted to suggest that we add some additional messaging after "server starting" - something like: $ pg_ctl -D datadir -l logfile start server starting (to wait for confirmation that server actually started, try pg_ctl again with --wait) What do you guys think? Is it important to keep pg_ctl output more terse than this? I do think something like this could help new users avoid frustration. I'm happy to write a patch for this if it's helpful, though it's such a simple change that if one of the core devs wants this s/he can probably more easily just add it themselves. Cheers, Ryan
