Re: create tablespace fails silently, or succeeds improperly

Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net>

From: Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net>
To: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
Cc: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>, Dave Cramer <pg@fastcrypt.com>, PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 2010-12-11T04:17:21Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
* Robert Haas (robertmhaas@gmail.com) wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 10:33 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> > Anybody have a problem with adopting this behavior?
> 
> Seems a bit surprising.

Yeahh..  I'm not really sure about mkdir -p type actions from a SQL
command.  Not entirely sure why but it doesn't feel 'right' to me.  I'd
rather have PG complain "that directory doesn't exist".  It's not a
terribly strong feeling though, more of a "that's kind of suprising",
since, as you point out, PG would have to have the necessary permissions
to create the directories, and I know that it probably wouldn't on
systems that I set up, but I don't really like relying on the FS
permissions to realize something like this was happening...

At the end of the day, I think you'll get people who will see a
permission denied and go "oh, I need to grant PG rights to mkdir in /,
sure, why not", even though that might mean creating a directory on a
small root FS which will then run out of space quickly...

Just my 2c.

	Stephen