Last night I had to deal with a puzzled user of version 8.4 who found
postgres refused to start but didn't log any error. It turned out that
there was an error in the pg_hba.conf file, and the client was running
in silent mode (the SUSE default).
This seems like a bug, and it's certainly not very postgres-like behaviour.
Can we move the call to hba_load() in postmaster.c down a bit so it
occurs after the SysLogger is set up? ISTM we really need an absolute
minimum of code between the call to pmdaemonize() and SysLogger_Start().
(Maybe there's a good case for deprecating silent mode. I'm not sure why
Suse uses it. Other distros don't seem to feel the need.)
cheers
andrew