Josh Kupershmidt, reviewed by Fujii Masao

The endterm attribute is mainly useful when the toolchain does not support
automatic link target text generation for a particular situation.  In  the
past, this was required by the man page tools for all reference page links,
but that is no longer the case, and it now actually gets in the way of
proper automatic link text generation.  The only remaining use cases are
currently xrefs to refsects.

Enabled by recovery_connections = on (default) and forcing archive recovery using a recovery.conf. Recovery processing now emulates the original transactions as they are replayed, providing full locking and MVCC behaviour for read only queries. Recovery must enter consistent state before connections are allowed, so there is a delay, typically short, before connections succeed. Replay of recovering transactions can conflict and in some cases deadlock with queries during recovery; these result in query cancellation after max_standby_delay seconds have expired. Infrastructure changes have minor effects on normal running, though introduce four new types of WAL record.

New test mode "make standbycheck" allows regression tests of static command behaviour on a standby server while in recovery. Typical and extreme dynamic behaviours have been checked via code inspection and manual testing. Few port specific behaviours have been utilised, though primary testing has been on Linux only so far.

This commit is the basic patch. Additional changes will follow in this release to enhance some aspects of behaviour, notably improved handling of conflicts, deadlock detection and query cancellation. Changes to VACUUM FULL are also required.

Simon Riggs, with significant and lengthy review by Heikki Linnakangas, including streamlined redesign of snapshot creation and two-phase commit.

Important contributions from Florian Pflug, Mark Kirkwood, Merlin Moncure, Greg Stark, Gianni Ciolli, Gabriele Bartolini, Hannu Krosing, Robert Haas, Tatsuo Ishii, Hiroyuki Yamada plus support and feedback from many other community members.

another section if required by the platform (instead of the old way of
building them in section "l" and always transforming them to the
platform-specific section).

This speeds up the installation on common platforms, and it avoids some
funny business with the man page tools and build process.

Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:

        may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."

        can - ability, "I can lift that log."

        might - possibility, "It might rain today."

Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
choice.  Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".

where appropriate. Add "id" and "xreflabel" tags to the descriptions
of the GUC variables to facilitate this. Also make a few minor docs
cleanups.

$Header: -> $PostgreSQL Changes ...

vague cross-references with real links.

including:

- replacing all the appropriate usages of <citetitle>PostgreSQL
...</citetitle> with &cite-user;, &cite-admin;, and so on

- fix an omission in the EXECUTE documentation

- add some more text to the EXPLAIN documentation

- improve the PL/PgSQL RETURN NEXT documentation (more work to do here)

- minor markup fixes


Neil Conway

 capabilities of specifying time zones as intervals per SQL9x.
Put refentrytitle contents on the same line as the tag.
 Otherwise, leading whitespace is propagated into the product, which
 (at least) messes up the ToC layout.
Remove (some) docinfo tags containing dates. Best to omit if the dates
 are not accurate; maybe use CVS dates instead or leave them out.

* Store two past checkpoint locations, not just one, in pg_control.
  On startup, we fall back to the older checkpoint if the newer one
  is unreadable.  Also, a physical copy of the newest checkpoint record
  is kept in pg_control for possible use in disaster recovery (ie,
  complete loss of pg_xlog).  Also add a version number for pg_control
  itself.  Remove archdir from pg_control; it ought to be a GUC
  parameter, not a special case (not that it's implemented yet anyway).

* Suppress successive checkpoint records when nothing has been entered
  in the WAL log since the last one.  This is not so much to avoid I/O
  as to make it actually useful to keep track of the last two
  checkpoints.  If the things are right next to each other then there's
  not a lot of redundancy gained...

* Change CRC scheme to a true 64-bit CRC, not a pair of 32-bit CRCs
  on alternate bytes.  Polynomial borrowed from ECMA DLT1 standard.

* Fix XLOG record length handling so that it will work at BLCKSZ = 32k.

* Change XID allocation to work more like OID allocation.  (This is of
  dubious necessity, but I think it's a good idea anyway.)

* Fix a number of minor bugs, such as off-by-one logic for XLOG file
  wraparound at the 4 gig mark.

* Add documentation and clean up some coding infelicities; move file
  format declarations out to include files where planned contrib
  utilities can get at them.

* Checkpoint will now occur every CHECKPOINT_SEGMENTS log segments or
  every CHECKPOINT_TIMEOUT seconds, whichever comes first.  It is also
  possible to force a checkpoint by sending SIGUSR1 to the postmaster
  (undocumented feature...)

* Defend against kill -9 postmaster by storing shmem block's key and ID
  in postmaster.pid lockfile, and checking at startup to ensure that no
  processes are still connected to old shmem block (if it still exists).

* Switch backends to accept SIGQUIT rather than SIGUSR1 for emergency
  stop, for symmetry with postmaster and xlog utilities.  Clean up signal
  handling in bootstrap.c so that xlog utilities launched by postmaster
  will react to signals better.

* Standalone bootstrap now grabs lockfile in target directory, as added
  insurance against running it in parallel with live postmaster.

shows up in psql now.