Improve replication usability

First off, thanks for a great product.

I've been looking at setting up replication on Windows between two servers using pgsql 9.1

I'm going to give up for now though because I'm finding it difficult to get it working correctly; after copying the \data directory as per the guide at http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Streaming_Replication the server won't start anymore - no errors are logged.

It seems to be this problem, but after making sure the postgres user owns all data files, it still wont start, http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-admin/2010-11/msg00258.php

I'm a software developer and setup mysql/postgresql when needed; but I find that both of these products are too complicated when it comes to something like HA/replication.

Can I please suggest the following improvements for a future release?

1) One line setup of replication. Allow me to issue a 'SELECT pg_replication_connect(remote host)' that will:

a) Perform a backup/download the current database (from scratch) - don't need me to copy database files

b) Come online and enter a standby state

2) Allow me to easily test failover (issue a SELECT, or just via the trigger file?)

3) Options like archive_command etc that need to be typed out manually should be obsolete; let the database server sync itself without needing a manual file copy.

Basically, I'm suggesting to please remove the administrator overhead for setting up replication. I appreciate the complexity of such a system, but it would be fantastic to make it _super trivial_ to get replication working and online without the possibility of these problems.

Thanks,

Andrew