I'll try to expand my explanation.
I fully understand and accept the arguments about "limited sense to go
into the control file" and "about recording *anything* in the control
file". This is totally correct for vanilla.
But vendors have forks of PostgreSQL with custom features and extensions.
Sometimes (especially at the first releases) these custom components
have bugs which can causes rare problems in data.
These problems can migrate with using pg_upgrade and "lazy" upgrade of
pages to higher versions of PostgreSQL fork.
So in error cases "recording crash information" etc. is not the only
important information.
Very important is history of this database (pg_upgrades, promotions,
pg_resets, pg_rewinds etc.).
Often these "history" allows you to determine from which version of the
PostgreSQL fork the error came from and what causes of errors we can
discard immediately.
This "history" is the information that our technical support wants (and
reason of this patch), but this information is not needed for vanilla...
Another important condition is that the user should not have easy ways
to delete information about "history" (about reason to use pg_control
file as "history" storage, but write into it from position 4kB, 8kB,...).
--
With best regards,
Dmitry Koval
Postgres Professional: http://postgrespro.com