It seems like your replication strategy works unnecessarily hard to
track transaction
boundaries.  If the master fails and the slave has a partial
transaction,  then the
new server process would need to truncate the partial transaction at
startup,
just as it would if the same condition happened without replication
involved.

The careful rsync strategy that I think I've posted here earlier can
easily
run every minute, and it recognizes when packs happen.  If you need
more frequent
updates, I think you can use the same inode-checking strategy along with
a remote "tail -f" to get the job done.   Is that not right?

I think what you've done is cool, I'm just not sure if it is cool
enough to change the
file format.   Am I overlooking something?