Prevent new timeline during archive recovery

Greetings,
We're currently developing an alternative to pg_standby, internally named
pg_ha.
pg_ha uses Record Based Log Shipping fetched by the warm standby server at
millisecond intervals and will automatically restore completed WAL files on
the standby server to minimize the time required when restoring it to
production status after a failure on the primary server.
Once completed we'd be happy to donate the code to the PostGreSQL community
to assist in promoting the database server as a High Availability option.

During each restore cycle however we notice that PostGreSQL spawns a new
timeline for the recovered archive as described in section 24.3.4 at
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/continuous-archiving.html#BACKUP-BASE-BACKUP
.
Is it possible to specify that no new timeline should be spawned during the
archiver recovery process?

The only workaround otherwise appears to be to detect the current timeline
number using pg_controldata and rename copied WAL files accordingly prior to
initiating the archive recovery process.

Any input would be most appreciated.

Cheers
Jona