For those who don't know, pgindent is the tool used to indent the source code of PostgreSQL. dash is the shell that ships as /bin/sh on at least Ubuntu.
pgindent requires indent from BSD (we use a patched version from NetBSD, the source is available on the PostgreSQL ftp site), and specifically does not work with GNU indent. Guess what Ubuntu ships with.
The solution is of course a small script that runs BSD indent from a different directory, and also points out the typedefs.list file from the PostgreSQL git repo. Something like this:
#!/bin/sh
export PATH=src/tools/pgindent:$PATH
src/tools/pgindent/pgindent src/tools/pgindent/typedefs.list $*
Spot the error? Yeah, that calls /bin/sh, which is dash. Which gives some really interesting results with pgindent, none of which are what you expect.
So if you run pgindent through a script like this, be sure to use /bin/bash and not /bin/sh!