> > If I "sudo su - couchdb" followed by "couchdb", I see nothing.
> 
> There's no output from this command sequence whatsoever? If so, that's
> most odd. Does it start a beam process and just halt or return you to
> the shell?

>From the user's point of view, it just sits there - it doesn't return to the
shell (with -b it returns to the shell of course). However ps does show the
beam. The strace of the process shows it waiting, but I couldn't glean
anything useful from that.

I tried advancing to the next checkout:

commit d8f6a91ff5eec5232a7adc4fb2a198c08840b0ca
Author: kocolosk <kocolosk@13f79535-47bb-0310-9956-ffa450edef68>
Date:   Sun Aug 30 20:08:43 2009 +0000

    use a POSIX-compatible invocation of basename
    
    git-svn-id: http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/couchdb/trunk@809407 13f79535-47bb-0310-9956-ffa450edef68

It makes no difference:
- /usr/local/etc/init.d/couchdb start says [OK]
- processes are started, but nothing listens on 5984
- /usr/local/etc/init.d/couchdb stop says [OK] but does nothing
  (processes still running)

Regards,

Brian.