This is consistent with the POSIX verdict that kill() shall not report
ESRCH for a zombie process. Back-patch to 9.0 (all supported versions).
Test code from commit d7cdf6ee36 depends
on it, and log messages about kill() reporting "Invalid argument" will
cease to appear for this not-unexpected condition.
On immediate shutdown, or during a restart-after-crash sequence,
postmaster used to send SIGQUIT (and then abandon ship if shutdown); but
this is not a good strategy if backends don't die because of that
signal. (This might happen, for example, if a backend gets tangled
trying to malloc() due to gettext(), as in an example illustrated by
MauMau.) This causes problems when later trying to restart the server,
because some processes are still attached to the shared memory segment.
Instead of just abandoning such backends to their fates, we now have
postmaster hang around for a little while longer, send a SIGKILL after
some reasonable waiting period, and then exit. This makes immediate
shutdown more reliable.
There is disagreement on whether it's best for postmaster to exit after
sending SIGKILL, or to stick around until all children have reported
death. If this controversy is resolved differently than what this patch
implements, it's an easy change to make.
Bug reported by MauMau in message 20DAEA8949EC4E2289C6E8E58560DEC0@maumau
MauMau and Álvaro Herrera
SHGetFolderPath.
This removes the direct dependency on shell32.dll and user32.dll, which
eats a lot of "desktop heap" for each backend that's started. The
desktop heap is a very limited resource, causing backends to no
longer start once it's been exhausted.
We still have indirect depdendencies on user32.dll through third party
libraries, but those can't easily be removed.
Dave Page
Also performed an initial run through of upgrading our Copyright date to
extend to 2005 ... first run here was very simple ... change everything
where: grep 1996-2004 && the word 'Copyright' ... scanned through the
generated list with 'less' first, and after, to make sure that I only
picked up the right entries ...
Bruce Momjian