Linefeeds were originally used in the place of <p> tags to denote a paragraph. While much of the linefeed usage has been replaced over time, there were many places where it was still being used, especially in reference.xml. This made it difficult to get consistent formatting across different output types. In particular there were formatting issues in the command-line help because it is harder to audit than HTML or PDF.
Replace linefeed formatting with proper <p> tags to make formatting more consistent.
Remove double spaces in all text where <p> tags were added since it does not add churn.
Update all <ul>/<ol>/<li> tags to the more general <list>/<list-item> tags.
Add a few missing periods.
Up to four repositories may be configured. A potential benefit is the ability to have a local repository for fast restores and a remote repository for redundancy.
Some commands, e.g. stanza-create/stanza-update, will automatically work with all configured repositories while others, e.g. stanza-delete, will require a repository to be specified using the repo option. See the command reference for details on which commands require the repository to be specified.
Note that the repo option is not required when only repo1 is configured in order to maintain backward compatibility. However, the repo option is required when a single repo is configured as, e.g. repo2. This is to prevent command breakage if a new repository is added later.
The archive-push command will always push WAL to the archive in all configured repositories but backups will need to be scheduled individually for each repository. In many cases this is desirable since backup types and retention will vary by repository. Likewise, restores must specify a repository. It is generally better to specify a repository for restores that has low latency/cost even if that means more recovery time. Only restore testing can determine which repository will be most efficient.
For single repository configurations there should be no change in behavior.
Bug Fixes:
* Fix resume after partial delete of backup by prior resume. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang. Reported by Tom Swartz.)
Features:
* Add repo-ls command. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang, Stefan Fercot.)
* Add repo-get command. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot, David Steele. Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
* Add archive-mode-check option. (Contributed by Stefan Fercot. Reviewed by David Steele, Michael Banck.)
Improvements:
* Improve archive-get performance. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
Azure and Azure-compatible object stores can now be used for repository storage.
Currently only shared key authentication is supported but SAS will be added soon.
It would be better if the documentation could be generated on multiple operating systems all in one go, but the doc system currently does not allow vars to be changed once they are set.
The solution is to run the docs for each required OS and stitch the documentation together. It's not pretty but it works and the automation in release.pl should at least make it easy to use.
IMPORTANT NOTE: The new TLS/SSL implementation forbids dots in S3 bucket names per RFC-2818. This security fix is required for compliant hostname verification.
Bug Fixes:
* Fix issues when a path option is / terminated. (Reported by Marc Cousin.)
* Fix issues when log-level-file=off is set for the archive-get command. (Reported by Brad Nicholson.)
* Fix C code to recognize host:port option format like Perl does. (Reported by Kyle Nevins.)
* Fix issues with remote/local command logging options.
Improvements:
* The archive-push command is implemented entirely in C.
* Increase process-max limit to 999. (Suggested by Rakshitha-BR.)
* Improve error message when an S3 bucket name contains dots.
Documentation Improvements:
* Clarify that S3-compatible object stores are supported. (Suggested by Magnus Hagander.)
The documentation mentioned Amazon S3 frequently but failed to mention that other S3-compatible object stores are also supported.
Tone down the specific mentions of Amazon S3 and replace them with "S3-compatible object store" when appropriate.
Suggested by Magnus Hagander.
Bug Fixes:
* Fix directory syncs running recursively when only the specified directory should be synced. (Reported by Craig A. James.)
* Fix archive-copy throwing "path not found" error for incr/diff backups. (Reported by yummyliu, Vitaliy Kukharik.)
* Fix failure in manifest build when two or more files in PGDATA are linked to the same directory. (Reported by Vitaliy Kukharik.)
* Fix delta restore failing when a linked file is missing.
* Fix rendering of key/value and list options in help. (Reported by Clinton Adams.)
Features:
* Add asynchronous, parallel archive-get. This feature maintains a queue of WAL segments to help reduce latency when PostgreSQL requests a WAL segment with restore_command.
* Add support for additional pgBackRest configuration files in the directory specified by the --config-include-path option. Add --config-path option for overriding the default base path of the --config and --config-include-path option. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang.)
* Add repo-s3-token option to allow temporary credentials tokens to be configured. pgBackRest currently has no way to request new credentials so the entire command (e.g. backup, restore) must complete before the credentials expire. (Contributed by Yogesh Sharma.)
Improvements:
* Update the archive-push-queue-max, manifest-save-threshold, and buffer-size options to accept values in KB, MB, GB, TB, or PB where the multiplier is a power of 1024. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang.)
* Make backup/restore path sync more efficient. Scanning the entire directory can be very expensive if there are a lot of small tables. The backup manifest contains the path list so use it to perform syncs instead of scanning the backup/restore path.
* Show command parameters as well as command options in initial info log message.
* Rename archive-queue-max option to archive-push-queue-max to avoid confusion with the new archive-get-queue-max option. The old option name will continue to be accepted.
Features:
* The archive-push command is now partially coded in C which allows the PostgreSQL archive_command to run significantly faster when processing status messages from the asynchronous archive process. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
Improvements:
* Improve check command to verify that the backup manifest can be built. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang.)
* Improve performance of HTTPS client. Buffering now takes the pending bytes on the socket into account (when present) rather than relying entirely on select(). In some instances the final bytes would not be flushed until the connection was closed.
* Improve S3 delete performance. The constant S3_BATCH_MAX had been replaced with a hard-coded value of 2, probably during testing.
* Allow any non-command-line option to be reset to default on the command-line. This allows options in pgbackrest.conf to be reset to default which reduces the need to write new configuration files for specific needs.
* The C library is now required. This eliminates conditional loading and eases development of new library features.
* The pgbackrest executable is now a C binary instead of Perl. This allows certain time-critical commands (like async archive-push) to run more quickly.
* Rename db-* options to pg-* and backup-* options to repo-* to improve consistency. repo-* options are now indexed although currently only one is allowed.
Bug Fixes:
* Fixed an issue where read-only operations that used local worker processes (i.e. restore) were creating write locks that could interfere with parallel archive-push. (Reported by Jens Wilke.)
Features:
* Added the stanza-upgrade command to provide a mechanism for upgrading a stanza after upgrading to a new major version of PostgreSQL. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang.)
* Added validation of pgbackrest.conf to display warnings if options are not valid or are not in the correct section. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang.)
Refactoring:
* Simplify locking scheme. Now, only the master process will hold write locks (for archive-push and backup commands) and not all local and remote worker processes as before.
* Refactor Ini.pm to facilitate testing.
* Do not set timestamps of files in the backup directories to match timestamps in the cluster directory. This was originally done to enable backup resume, but that process is now implemented with checksums.
* Improved error message when the restore command detects the presence of postmaster.pid. (Suggested by Yogesh Sharma.)
* Renumber return codes between 25 and 125 to avoid PostgreSQL interpreting some as fatal signal exceptions. (Suggested by Yogesh Sharma.)
* The backup and restore commands no longer copy via temp files. In both cases the files are checksummed on resume so there's no danger of partial copies.
* Allow functions to accept optional parameters as a hash.
* Refactor File->list() and fileList() to accept optional parameters.
* Refactor backupLabel() and add unit tests.
* Silence some perl critic warnings. (Contributed by Cynthia Shang.)
Bug Fixes:
* Fixed and issue that suppressed exceptions in PDF builds.
Features:
* Allow a source to be included as a section so large documents can be broken up.
* Added section link support to Markdown output.
* Added list support to PDF output.
* Added include option to explicitly build sources (complements the exclude option though both cannot be used in the same invocation).
* Added keyword-add option to add keywords without overriding the default keyword.
* Added debug option to doc.pl to easily add the debug keyword to documentation builds.
* Added pre option to doc.pl to easily add the pre keyword to documentation builds.
Refactoring:
* Improvements to markdown rendering.
* Remove code dependency on project variable, instead use title param.
Added an execution cache so that documentation can be generated without setting up the full container environment. This is useful for packaging, keeps the documentation consistent for a release, and speeds up generation when no changes are made in the execution list.
Release notes are now broken into sections so that bugs, features, and refactors are clearly delineated. An "Additional Notes" section has been added for changes to documentation and the test suite that do not affect the core code.
The change log was the last piece of documentation to be rendered in Markdown only. Wrote a converter so the document can be output by the standard renderers. The change log will now be located on the website and has been renamed to "Releases".
* Fixed an issue where longer-running backups/restores would timeout when remote and threaded. Keepalives are now used to make sure the remote for the main process does not timeout while the thread remotes do all the work. The error message for timeouts was also improved to make debugging easier.
* Allow restores to be performed on a read-only repository by using --no-lock and --log-level-file=off. The --no-lock option can only be used with restores.
* Minor styling changes, clarifications and rewording in the user guide.
* The dev branch has been renamed to master and for the time being the master branch has renamed to release, though it will probably be removed at some point -- thus ends the gitflow experiment for pgBackRest. It is recommended that any forks get re-forked and clones get re-cloned.
