Re: WAL & RC1 status

ncm@zembu.com (Nathan Myers) writes:
> It Seems to Me that after an orderly shutdown, the WAL files should be, 
> effectively, slag -- they should contain no deltas from the current 
> table contents.  In practice that means the only part of the format that 
> *should* matter is whatever it takes to discover that they really are 
> slag.

> That *should* mean that, at worst, a change to the WAL file format should 
> only require doing an orderly shutdown, and then (perhaps) running a simple
> program to generate a new-format empty WAL.  It ought not to require an 
> initdb.  

Excellent point, considering that we were already thinking of making a
handy-dandy little utility to remove broken WAL files...  Shouldn't take
much more than that to build something that also reformats pg_control.
Thanks for the suggestion!
        regards, tom lane