In WT-4535 certain commands inside of the wt utility command started specifying read-only mode always. There has been a lot of fallout from that change in WT-5100 and WT-5102. That fallout comes in the form of an assertion failure and dropping core.

[1567617703:17577][99927:0x700004f89000], wt, statlog-server: __wt_open, 247: lock_file || !LF_ISSET(WT_FS_OPEN_CREATE)
[1567617703:17655][99927:0x700004f89000], wt, statlog-server: __wt_abort, 28: aborting WiredTiger library

Today I did a simple run of:

% ./test_timestamp_abort -T 5 -t 5
% ../../wt -h WT_TEST.timestamp-abort printlog

and got the above failure. That is on a cleanly shutdown database that did not require recovery either. The above set of commands are a common usage for me.

I think we need to revisit the changes from WT-4535.

• Normal usage should not drop core.
• Normal usage should work.
• Normal usage should not require any manual file manipulation nor intermediary steps.
• Normal usage should not require any knowledge of how the database was created by some program.
• Read-only should be an explicit request, not something assumed under the covers.
• There are too many implicit things that happen under the covers (like stats, log files, basecfg, etc) for the wt command to assume read-only is always correct.