Replace it with an approach similar to what GiST uses: when a page is split,
the left sibling is marked with a flag indicating that the parent hasn't been
updated yet. When the parent is updated, the flag is cleared. If an insertion
steps on a page with the flag set, it will finish split before proceeding
with the insertion.
The post-recovery cleanup mechanism was never totally reliable, as insertion
to the parent could fail e.g because of running out of memory or disk space,
leaving the tree in an inconsistent state.
This also divides the responsibility of WAL-logging more clearly between
the generic ginbtree.c code, and the parts specific to entry and posting
trees. There is now a common WAL record format for insertions and deletions,
which is written by ginbtree.c, followed by tree-specific payload, which is
returned by the placetopage- and split- callbacks.
The new rmgrlist.h header, containing all necessary data
about built-in resource managers, allows other pieces of code to
access them.
In particular, this allows a future pg_xlogdump program to extract
rm_desc function pointers, without having to keep a duplicate list of
them.
Heikki Linnakangas
Alvaro Herrera