odd output in restore mode

I have just been working on setting up a continuous recovery failover 
system, and noticed some odd log lines, shown below. (Using 8.3).

First note that our parsing of recovery.conf in xlog.c is pretty bad, 
and at least we need to document the quirks if it's not going to be 
fixed. log_restartpoints is said to be boolean, but when I set it to an 
unquoted true I got a fatal error, while a quoted 'on' sets it to false, 
as seen. Ick. What is more, I apparently managed to get the recovery 
server to lose a WAL file and hang totally by having a bad 
recovery.conf. Triple ick.

Second, what is all this about .history files? My understanding is that 
they are not necessary, so surely we should try to stat them to see if 
they are present before trying to copy them. These lines are going to 
confuse a lot of people, I suspect (including me).

Lastly, not quite related to this output, but in the same general area, 
should we have an option on pg_standby to allow removing the archive 
file after it has been restored?

cheers

andrew





LOG:  database system was interrupted; last known up at 2008-05-12 
15:18:23 EDT
LOG:  starting archive recovery
LOG:  log_restartpoints = false
LOG:  restore_command = '../bin/pg_standby -t ../common_archive/failover 
../common_archive %f %p %r '
cp: cannot stat `../common_archive/00000001.history': No such file or 
directory
cp: cannot stat `../common_archive/00000001.history': No such file or 
directory
cp: cannot stat `../common_archive/00000001.history': No such file or 
directory
LOG:  restored log file "0000000100000000000000A5.00000068.backup" from 
archive
LOG:  restored log file "0000000100000000000000A5" from archive
LOG:  automatic recovery in progress
LOG:  redo starts at 0/A50000B0
LOG:  restored log file "0000000100000000000000A6" from archive
LOG:  restored log file "0000000100000000000000A7" from archive
LOG:  restored log file "0000000100000000000000A8" from archive
LOG:  restored log file "0000000100000000000000A9" from archive
trigger file found
LOG:  could not open file "pg_xlog/0000000100000000000000AA" (log file 
0, segment 170): No such file or directory
LOG:  redo done at 0/A9000068
LOG:  restored log file "0000000100000000000000A9" from archive
cp: cannot stat `../common_archive/00000002.history': No such file or 
directory
cp: cannot stat `../common_archive/00000002.history': No such file or 
directory
cp: cannot stat `../common_archive/00000002.history': No such file or 
directory
LOG:  selected new timeline ID: 2
cp: cannot stat `../common_archive/00000001.history': No such file or 
directory
cp: cannot stat `../common_archive/00000001.history': No such file or 
directory
cp: cannot stat `../common_archive/00000001.history': No such file or 
directory
LOG:  archive recovery complete
LOG:  database system is ready to accept connections
LOG:  autovacuum launcher started