Re: PostgreSQL crashes with Qmail-SQL

Bear Giles <bear@coyotesong.com> writes:

> > Caution: I wasted some time running "benchmarks" that proved only
> > to be exercising how fast the client could fail.  qmail-getpw's
> > approach to error handling seems to be (a) don't bother testing for
> > very many error conditions (eg, it coredumps on an empty sqlserver
> > control file), and (b) if it does detect a failure, exiting with a
> > nonzero error code is a sufficient way of reporting it.  Error messages
> > are for wimps, apparently.
> 
> (b) is part of the qmail strategy - qmail is implemented as a set
> of independent processes with different owners and rights and they
> communicate problems through standard exit codes.  
> 
> 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 is that too insecure for
him?

-Doug
-- 
Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.
   --T. J. Jackson, 1863