After reading this discussion, I agree that pg_rewind needs to become
smarter in order to be fully useful in production environments; right
now there are many warts and corner cases that did not seem to have been
considered during the initial development (which I think is all right,
taking into account that its mere concept was complicated enough; so we
need not put any blame on the original developers, rather the contrary).
I think we need to make the program simple to use (i.e. not have the
user write shell globs for the common log file naming patterns) while
remaining powerful (i.e. not forcibly copy any files that do not match
hardcoded globs). Is the current dry-run mode enough to give the user
peace of mind regarding what would be done in terms of testing globs
etc? If not, maybe the debug mode needs to be improved (for instance,
have it report the file size for each file that would be copied;
otherwise you may not notice it's going to copy the 20GB log file until
it's too late ...)
Now, in order for any of this to happen, there will need to be a
champion to define what the missing pieces are, write all those patches
and see them through the usual (cumbersome, slow) procedure. Are you,
Chris, willing to take the lead on that?
--
Álvaro Herrera https://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services