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.
"standby follow" was originally co-opted to start up a demoted node;
this functionality is now delegated to "node rejoin", with the core
functionality of "standby follow" implemented as an internal function.
If the current primary (demotion candidate) still has any files to archive,
it will delay the shutdown until all files are archived. If there is a
substantial number of files, and/or the archive command executes slowly,
this will probably lead to an unwelcome delay in the switchover process.
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.
There are some circumstances, e.g. during switchover operations,
where repmgr may need to operate on a data directory while the
server isn't running, in which case there's no way to retrieve
that information.
