> On 7 Jul 2021, at 04:23, Gurjeet Singh <gurj...@singh.im> wrote:
> I'm not able to come up with an exact situation to prove this, but > this behaviour seems potentially dangerous. The user might mix the > --sync-only option with other options, but would be extremely > surprised if those other options didn't take effect. Is if there is a plausible real world situation where a user runs --sync-only together with other arguments and also miss the fact that the other arguments didn't take effect, and have bad consequences? > I _think_ we should throw an error if the user specifies any options > that are being ignored. But an error might break someone's automation > (perhaps for their own good), since the current behaviour has been in > place for a very long time, so I'm willing to settle for at least a > warning in such a case. We typically don't issue warnings for incompatible arguments, but rather error out, and I'm not convinced this warrants breaking that. If we are going to do anything I think we should error out; if we decide to do something then we consider the scripts that will break to already be broken. A slightly confusing aspect of this is however the error message for sync-only when -D or PGDATA isn't set says "will reside" when in fact it should say "is residing" (or something along those lines): $ ./bin/initdb --sync-only initdb: error: no data directory specified You must identify the directory where the data for this database system will reside. Do this with either the invocation option -D or the environment variable PGDATA. I doubt it's worth complicating the code for this fringe case though. -- Daniel Gustafsson https://vmware.com/
