While implementing streaming replication client functionality for Npgsql I stumbled upon a minor documentation error at https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/protocol-replication.html
The "content" return value for the TIMELINE_HISTORYcommand is advertised as bytea while it is in fact raw ASCII bytes. How did I find out? Since the value I get doesn't start with a "\x" and contains ascii text, although I've bytea_outputset to hex, I first thought that the streaming replication protocol simply doesn't honor bytea_output, but then I realized that I also get unencoded tabs and newlines which wouldn't be possible if the value woud be passed through byteaout. This is certainly a minor problem since the timeline history file only contains generated strings that are ASCII-only, so just using the unencoded bytes is actually easier than decoding bytea. OTOH it did cost me a few hours (writing a bytea decoder and figuring out why it doesn't work by looking at varlena.c and proving the docs wrong) so I want to point this out here since it is possibly an unintended behavior or at least a documentation error. Also I'm wary of taking dependency on an undocumented implementation detail that could possibly change at any point. Regards, Brar
