I wrote: > I'd have thought that pg_regress would have a more obvious failure if it > was trying to use an old libpq.so version though --- it should have > looked similar to what you referenced for pg_dump, for instance. I think I see what's going on here. pg_regress itself doesn't link to libpq at all. psql uses some of the new functions that were added to libpq in 9.0, so psql is guaranteed to fail if the linker tries to link it to an 8.4 version of libpq, which is probably what was happening before you did "make install". The reason that this led to the observed behavior is that pg_regress does this to see if the postmaster is running yet: if (system("psql ... 2>/dev/null") == 0) // postmaster is ready else // keep waiting So psql failed, spewed something to stderr that went right into the bit bucket, and pg_regress just saw that as an expected failure and kept waiting. I'm not immediately seeing a simple way to improve this. It'd be nice if we didn't hide "unexpected" errors like the link failure with libpq. On the other hand we surely don't want to show the expected connection failures until the postmaster is up. Maybe psql should have a "really quiet" mode that doesn't print anything even on errors, and then we wouldn't have to route its stderr to /dev/null? But given how seldom this sort of thing comes up (I don't recall any similar previous reports, actually) maybe it's not worth the trouble. regards, tom lane -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general