On Fri, 18 Jan 2008, Dave Page wrote:
For just about zero cost we could drop something like: -------- Architecture: Darwin snake 8.11.1 Darwin Kernel Version 8.11.1: Wed Oct 10 18:23:28 PDT 2007; root:xnu-792.25.20~1/RELEASE_I386 i386 i386 Configuration: '--prefix=/usr/local/pgsql83/' '--enable-integer-datetimes' '--with-openssl' '--with-perl' '--with-python' '--with-tcl' '--without-tk' '--with-bonjour' '--with-pam' '--with-krb5' 'CFLAGS=-O -g -arch i386 -arch ppc' 'LDFLAGS=-ltcl' -------- in a file in $PGDATA
Stepping away from the question of whether it would have helped in this specific case for a second, around once a month or so there's someone in a panic here because they have a filesystem copy of a database they can't figure out how to use. Often the original server is a puddle of molten metal or something by that point and the person trying to restore the data is rather stressed.
The usual advice, telling them to replicate the binaries used to create it in the first place, isn't always the easiest to follow. It seems to me that including a "environment at cluster creation" note in $PGDATA like Dave suggests would be helpful for these cases; PG_VERSION just isn't enough information. I'd also throw in the locale information used for the cluster, as that seems like something it would be nice to have in simple text form as well there and is also a spot people are confused about.
-- * Greg Smith gsmith@xxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings
