When is _replicate synchronous?

[Jens Alfke]

The wiki docs for _replicate don’t say so, but in practice the call appears to 
be synchronous unless the ‘continuous’ property is set. That is, it doesn’t 
return a response until the replication completes, and in fact the response 
JSON includes a bunch of statistics about the replication.

I didn’t know this when I implemented TouchDB, so I made _replicate always 
asynchronous. (It made more sense to me, especially since my client code needed 
to be able to track the progress of a replication using _active_tasks, which 
meant it needed a response ASAP so it could get the task ID.)

I’m amending this now for Couchbase Lite, but I’d like to make sure I know the 
semantics. Is it true that it’s always synchronous unless continuous=true, and 
then it’s asynchronous?

Also, is there any description somewhere of what the properties in the 
synchronous response mean? Some are obvious, some less so. Here’s an example 
from 1.2:

 {
    "history": [
        {
            "doc_write_failures": 0, 
            "docs_read": 18, 
            "docs_written": 18, 
            "end_last_seq": 19, 
            "end_time": "Thu, 20 Jun 2013 16:58:13 GMT", 
            "missing_checked": 18, 
            "missing_found": 18, 
            "recorded_seq": 19, 
            "session_id": "1cef7405d0e61fb0decc89323669a012", 
            "start_last_seq": 0, 
            "start_time": "Thu, 20 Jun 2013 16:58:13 GMT"
        }
    ], 
    "ok": true, 
    "replication_id_version": 2, 
    "session_id": "1cef7405d0e61fb0decc89323669a012", 
    "source_last_seq": 19
}

I’m particularly curious (a) why “history” is an array, and (b) what 
“replication_id_version” means.

—Jens