Previously, we would archive the possible-incomplete WAL segment with its
normal filename, but that causes trouble if the server owning that timeline
is still running, and tries to archive the same segment later. It's not nice
for the standby to trip up the master's archival like that. And it's pretty
confusing, anyway, to have an incomplete segment in the archive that's
indistinguishable from a normal, complete segment.
To avoid such confusion, add a .partial suffix to the file. Or to be more
precise, make a copy of the old segment under the .partial suffix, and
archive that instead of the original file. pg_receivexlog also uses the
.partial suffix for the same purpose, to tell apart incompletely streamed
files from complete ones.
There is no automatic mechanism to use the .partial files at recovery, so
they will go unused, unless the administrator manually copies to them to
the pg_xlog directory (and removes the .partial suffix). Recovery won't
normally need the WAL - when recovering to the new timeline, it will find
the same WAL on the first segment on the new timeline instead - but it
nevertheless feels better to archive the file with the .partial suffix, for
debugging purposes if nothing else.
This improves on commit bbfd7edae5aa5ad5553d3c7e102f2e450d4380d4 by
making two simple changes:
* pg_attribute_noreturn now takes parentheses, ie pg_attribute_noreturn().
Likewise pg_attribute_unused(), pg_attribute_packed(). This reduces
pgindent's tendency to misformat declarations involving them.
* attributes are now always attached to function declarations, not
definitions. Previously some places were taking creative shortcuts,
which were not merely candidates for bad misformatting by pgindent
but often were outright wrong anyway. (It does little good to put a
noreturn annotation where callers can't see it.) In any case, if
we would like to believe that these macros can be used with non-gcc
compilers, we should avoid gratuitous variance in usage patterns.
I also went through and manually improved the formatting of a lot of
declarations, and got rid of excessively repetitive (and now obsolete
anyway) comments informing the reader what pg_attribute_printf is for.
Until now __attribute__() was defined to be empty for all compilers but
gcc. That's problematic because it prevents using it in other compilers;
which is necessary e.g. for atomics portability. It's also just
generally dubious to do so in a header as widely included as c.h.
Instead add pg_attribute_format_arg, pg_attribute_printf,
pg_attribute_noreturn macros which are implemented in the compilers that
understand them. Also add pg_attribute_noreturn and pg_attribute_packed,
but don't provide fallbacks, since they can affect functionality.
This means that external code that, possibly unwittingly, relied on
__attribute__ defined to be empty on !gcc compilers may now run into
warnings or errors on those compilers. But there shouldn't be many
occurances of that and it's hard to work around...
Discussion: 54B58BA3.8040302@ohmu.fi
Author: Oskari Saarenmaa, with some minor changes by me.
There was a wild mix of calling conventions: Some were declared to
return void and didn't return, some returned an int exit code, some
claimed to return an exit code, which the callers checked, but
actually never returned, and so on.
Now all of these functions are declared to return void and decorated
with attribute noreturn and don't return. That's easiest, and most
code already worked that way.
Also performed an initial run through of upgrading our Copyright date to
extend to 2005 ... first run here was very simple ... change everything
where: grep 1996-2004 && the word 'Copyright' ... scanned through the
generated list with 'less' first, and after, to make sure that I only
picked up the right entries ...
