Re: Immediate shutdown and system(3)

Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
> Ok, I've committed a minimal patch to pg_standby in CVS HEAD and 
> REL8_3_STABLE to not interpret SIGQUIT as a signal for failover. I 
> added a signal handler for SIGUSR1 to trigger failover; that should be 
> considered the preferred signal for that, even though SIGINT still 
> works too.
>
> SIGQUIT is trapped to just die immediately, but without core dumping. 
> As we still use SIGQUIT for immediate shutdown, any other 
> archive_command or restore_command will still receive SIGQUIT on 
> immediate shutdown, and by default dump core. Let's just live with 
> that for now..
>
> This should be mentioned in release notes, as any script that might be 
> using SIGQUIT at the moment needs to be changed to use SIGUSR1 or 
> SIGINT instead. Where should I make a note of that so that we don't 
> forget?
>
>

Unless I'm missing it the use of signals to trigger failover is not 
documented AT ALL. So why anyone would expect such behaviour is 
something of a mystery.

Perhaps doing that would be even more important than release notes.

cheers

andrew