Re: We should Axe /contrib/start-scripts

"Kevin Grittner" <Kevin.Grittner@wicourts.gov> writes:
> Thanks Andrew, Alvaro, and Chander.  You've given me some thoughts to
> toss around.  Of course, any of these is going to be somewhat more
> complex than using [ pg_ctl -w ]

Yeah.  I wonder if we shouldn't expend a bit more effort to make that
way bulletproof.  As I mentioned the other day, if there were a way for
pg_ctl to pass down its parent's PID then we could have the postmaster
exclude that as a false match, and then using pg_ctl would be just as
safe as invoking the postmaster directly.

The two ways I can see to do that are to add a command line switch
to the postmaster, or to pass the PID as an environment variable,
say "PG_GRANDPARENT_PID".  The latter is a bit uglier but it would
require touching much less code (and documentation).

Thoughts?
        regards, tom lane