Re: Minor documentation error regarding streaming replication protocol

On Tue, 2020-12-15 at 12:54 -0800, Andres Freund wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 2020-12-15 01:22:44 -0800, Jeff Davis wrote:
> > Attached a simple patch that enforces an all-ASCII restore point
> > name
> > rather than documenting the possibility of non-ASCII text.
>
> +1

On second thought, I'm going to retract this patch. The docs[1] say:

"You can, if you like, add comments to a history file to record your
own notes about how and why this particular timeline was created. Such
comments will be especially valuable when you have a thicket of
different timelines as a result of experimentation."

It doesn't say how the comments should be written, but they are
apparently "#"-style comments, and presumably can contain text in
whatever encoding you want, and will be sent along to the client.

I don't see a lot of value in taking an already minor hole and closing
it halfway.

Changing the descriptor to be bytea-binary would be a principled
solution, but others objected and I don't have strong enough feelings
about it. I can live with the documentation note mentioning that it's
really binary data, and just ignore the descriptor.

Regards,
Jeff Davis

[1]
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/continuous-archiving.html#BACKUP-TIMELINES