这个补丁不错, 省去了主从切换手工复制history文件的烦恼.
Before this patch, streaming replication would refuse to start replicating if the timeline in the primary doesn't exactly match the standby.
The situation where it doesn't match is when you have a master, and two standbys, and you promote one of the standbys to become new master. Promoting bumps up the timeline ID, and after that bump, the other standby would refuse to continue.
There's significantly more timeline related logic in streaming replication now.
First of all, when a standby connects to primary, it will ask the primary for any timeline history files that are missing from the standby.
The missing files are sent using a new replication command TIMELINE_HISTORY, and stored in standby's pg_xlog directory.
Using the timeline history files, the standby can follow the latest timeline present in the primary (recovery_target_timeline='latest'), just as it can follow new timelines appearing in an archive directory.
START_REPLICATION now takes a TIMELINE parameter, to specify exactly which timeline to stream WAL from. This allows the standby to request the primary to send over WAL that precedes the promotion.
The replication protocol is changed slightly (in a backwards-compatible way although there's little hope of streaming replication working across major versions anyway), to allow replication to stop when the end of timeline reached, putting the walsender back into accepting a replication command.
