Re: PostgreSQL crashes with Qmail-SQL

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Doug McNaught <doug@wireboard.com>
Cc: Bear Giles <bear@coyotesong.com>, Stephan Szabo <sszabo@megazone23.bigpanda.com>, Michael Devogelaere <michael@digibel.be>, Justin Clift <justin@postgresql.org>, PostgreSQL Hackers Mailing List <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 2002-02-01T19:32:28Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Doug McNaught <doug@wireboard.com> writes:
> Bear Giles <bear@coyotesong.com> writes:
>> We can agree that it should be more forthcoming with meaningful 
>> help for people setting up the system, but it can't just write an 
>> message to STDOUT because its caller has probably already set up
>> a pipe to another process - any error message would normally find 
>> itself inserted into the mail queue!

> Gaah.  Has djb ever heard of syslog(3)?

Or stderr?  There's a good reason why Unix has both stdout and stderr
as part of the standard process model.  stderr is for human-readable
error messages.  In a noninteractive situation you can send it to
/dev/null, if you don't believe in logging; but when a human is running
a program it's polite to say something on stderr before going belly-up.

			regards, tom lane