This is a remnant of the early repmgr days when there were no alternative
mechanisms for ensuring sufficient WAL remains available while cloning a
standby.
The purpose of this setting was to override a check for an (arbitrary)
minimum setting for "wal_keep_segments". As there's no reliable way
of determining a sensible value for this, and improvements in
pg_basebackup mean WALs can be streamed (possibly using a replication
slot) while the backup is in progress, there's no point in keeping
this around.
We will however still emit a warning about setting "wal_keep_segments"
if the configuration doesn't appear to provide any other way of
ensuring WAL is available during/after the cloning process and
"wal_keep_segments" is not set.
There are now too many options to sensibly fit into general --help
output; we'll add separate output for each repmgr command, e.g.
"repmgr node --help".
Previously repmgr would write all the default libpq parameters
into "primary_conninfo" on "standby clone", but not for
"standby follow", which is inconsistent.
For repmgr4 we'll determine that the upstream node's conninfo
must be canonical and contain all required connection parameters,
even if these are available as defaults or environment variables
in the local environment, as those are transient and may not
be available in all environments/situations.
recovery.conf's "primary_conninfo" will be generated using the
upstream's conninfo parameters, except for those specific
to the downstream node. These are:
- "application_name": this will always be set to the
"node_name" of the downstream node
- "passfile" and "servicefile": these, must of course
reference files on the downstream node so will be extracted
from the downstream node's conninfo, if set
When executing repmgr on remote nodes, we otherwise end up jumping
through hoops as we can't make assumptions about where the configuration
file is located, but really need to be able to provide it.
From a support point of view it will also make life easier as it will
be easy to specify exactly which file to provide.
