This was no longer the case with 2.8 becuase of a bug introduced with
the IPv6 support. Now it is fixed.

This fixes issue #1287 and #1477.

Currently replication offsets could be used into a limited way in order
to understand, out of a set of slaves, what is the one with the most
updated data. For example this comparison is possible of N slaves
were replicating all with the same master.

However the replication offset was not transferred from master to slaves
(that are later promoted as masters) in any way, so for instance if
there were three instances A, B, C, with A master and B and C
replication from A, the following could happen:

C disconnects from A.
B is turned into master.
A is switched to master of B.
B receives some write.

In this context there was no way to compare the offset of A and C,
because B would use its own local master replication offset as
replication offset to initialize the replication with A.

With this commit what happens is that when B is turned into master it
inherits the replication offset from A, making A and C comparable.
In the above case assuming no inconsistencies are created during the
disconnection and failover process, A will show to have a replication
offset greater than C.

Note that this does not mean offsets are always comparable to understand
what is, in a set of instances, since in more complex examples the
replica with the higher replication offset could be partitioned away
when picking the instance to elect as new master. However this in
general improves the ability of a system to try to pick a good replica
to promote to master.

CONFIG REWRITE is now wiser and does not touch what it does not
understand inside redis.conf.

Those options will be thrown without this patch:
  include, rename-command, min-slaves-to-write, min-slaves-max-lag,
appendfilename.

With this commit options not explicitly rewritten by CONFIG REWRITE are
not touched at all. These include new options that may not have support
for REWRITE, and other special cases like rename-command and include.

See commit c00453da for more info about the bug.

The bug could be easily triggered by:

    SADD foo a b c 1 2 3 4 5 6
    SDIFF foo foo

When the key was the same in two sets, an unsafe iterator was used to
check existence of elements in the same set we were iterating.
Usually this would just result into a wrong output, however with the
dict.c API misuse protection we have in place, the result was actually
an assertion failed that was triggered by the CI test, while creating
random datasets for the "MASTER and SLAVE consistency" test.

See issue #1448.

When a slave was disconnected from its master the replication offset was
reported as -1. Now it is reported as the replication offset of the
previous master, so that failover can be performed using this value in
order to try to select a slave with more processed data from a set of
slaves of the old master.

The previous fix for false positive timeout detected by master was not
complete. There is another blocking stage while loading data for the
first synchronization with the master, that is, flushing away the
current data from the DB memory.

This commit uses the newly introduced dict.c callback in order to make
some incremental work (to send "\n" heartbeats to the master) while
flushing the old data from memory.

It is hard to write a regression test for this issue unfortunately. More
support for debugging in the Redis core would be needed in terms of
functionalities to simulate a slow DB loading / deletion.

Redis hash table implementation has many non-blocking features like
incremental rehashing, however while deleting a large hash table there
was no way to have a callback called to do some incremental work.

This commit adds this support, as an optiona callback argument to
dictEmpty() that is currently called at a fixed interval (one time every
65k deletions).

Starting with Redis 2.8 masters are able to detect timed out slaves,
while before 2.8 only slaves were able to detect a timed out master.

Now that timeout detection is bi-directional the following problem
happens as described "in the field" by issue #1449:

1) Master and slave setup with big dataset.
2) Slave performs the first synchronization, or a full sync
   after a failed partial resync.
3) Master sends the RDB payload to the slave.
4) Slave loads this payload.
5) Master detects the slave as timed out since does not receive back the
   REPLCONF ACK acknowledges.

Here the problem is that the master has no way to know how much the
slave will take to load the RDB file in memory. The obvious solution is
to use a greater replication timeout setting, but this is a shame since
for the 0.1% of operation time we are forced to use a timeout that is
not what is suited for 99.9% of operation time.

This commit tries to fix this problem with a solution that is a bit of
an hack, but that modifies little of the replication internals, in order
to be back ported to 2.8 safely.

During the RDB loading time, we send the master newlines to avoid
being sensed as timed out. This is the same that the master already does
while saving the RDB file to still signal its presence to the slave.

The single newline is used because:

1) It can't desync the protocol, as it is only transmitted all or
nothing.
2) It can be safely sent while we don't have a client structure for the
master or in similar situations just with write(2).

The way the role change was recoded was not sane and too much
convoluted, causing the role information to be not always updated.

This commit fixes issue #1445.

When there is a master address switch, the reported role must be set to
master so that we have a chance to re-sample the INFO output to check if
the new address is reporting the right role.

Otherwise if the role was wrong, it will be sensed as wrong even after
the address switch, and for enough time according to the role change
time, for Sentinel consider the master SDOWN.

This fixes isue #1446, that describes the effects of this bug in
practice.

See issue #1419.

Sentinels are now desynchronized in a better way changing the time
handler frequency between 10 and 20 HZ. This way on average a
desynchronization of 25 milliesconds is produced that should be larger
enough compared to network latency, avoiding most split-brain condition
during the vote.

Now that the clocks are desynchronized, to have larger random delays when
performing operations can be easily achieved in the following way.
Take as example the function that starts the failover, that is
called with a frequency between 10 and 20 HZ and will start the
failover every time there are the conditions. By just adding as an
additional condition something like rand()%4 == 0, we can amplify the
desynchronization between Sentinel instances easily.

See issue #1419.