I tend to write about new features in new versions of PostgreSQL, but this patch actually fixes one of the things that annoy me a lot, so here it goes:

On 26th of January, Simon Riggs committed:

Log Message:
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Fix longstanding gripe that we check for 0000000001.history at start of
archive recovery, even when we know it is never present.

If you've ever tried to roll your own restore_command script ( like pg_standby ) then you know that to the algorithm that's presented in docs You always had to add special case for file “0000000001.history" – which was never there, but somehow PostgreSQL always asked for it – despite the fact that it could never arrive.

Now, thanks to this small patch we will no longer need to add this “if" in any script. It's small, and it's not a new feature, but I am SO happy to see it.