Re: Debugging initdb breakage

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com>

From: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com>
To: Dimitri Fontaine <dimitri@2ndquadrant.fr>
Cc: PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 2010-10-12T14:51:58Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Excerpts from Dimitri Fontaine's message of dom oct 10 17:38:01 -0300 2010:
> Hi,
> 
> So I'm beginning to work on the extension support for dump and restore,
> and that begins with a new pg_extension catalog. I managed to break
> initdb already, of course, but I'm fighting my way out — no luck with
> gdb, it won't catch the Assert failure and show me a backtrace. I tried
> "set follow-fork-mode child" in gdb, in different systems, to no avail.

As a note, I've had luck finding bootstrap-time bugs by manually feeding
the bootstrapping commands into bootstrap mode, with a leftover dir from
"initdb --noclean".  This has helped a few times that there has been no
PANIC but just a FATAL or ERROR, for example.  It's easy to attach GDB
to such a backend.

-- 
Álvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com>
The PostgreSQL Company - Command Prompt, Inc.
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