The "data_checksum_version" field towards the end of the ControlFileData struct,
meaning its position varies between versions. Previously this wasn't a problem
as it was only required for operations involving 9.5 and later, and its position
within the control file has not changed between the current release and current
HEAD.
However, in order to support pg_rewind in 9.3 and 9.4, which both have changes in
the control file format, we'll need version-specific parsing. This will also make
it easier to deal with any future changes to the control file format.
pg_rewind will only be executed on a demoted primary if explictly
requested, to prevent transactions on the primary, which
were never replicated, from being automatically overwritten.
If --force-rewind is provided, we'll need to check pg_rewind
is actually useable before we need to use it.
The repmgr3 implementation required the promotion candidate (standby)
to directly work with the demotion candidate's data directory,
directly execute server control commands etc.
Here we delegated a lot more of that work to the repmgr on the
demotion candidate, which reduces the amount of back-and-forth
over SSH and generally makes things cleaner and smoother.
In particular the repmgr on the demotion candidate will carry
out a thorough check that the node is shut down and report
the last checkpoint LSN to the promotion candidate; this
can then be used to determine whether pg_rewind needs to be
executed on the demoted primary before reintegrating it back
into the cluster (todo).
Also implement "--dry-run" for this action, which will sanity-check the
nodes as far as possible without executing the switchover.
Additionally some of the new repmgr node commands (or command options)
introduced for this can be also executed by the user to obtain
additional information about the status of each node.
This involves adding some infrastructure to parse pg_control in a
reasonably version-independent fashion. This will probably be useful
in other contexts where we need to verify the status of a
data directory where the instance isn't running.