force page param to be included in the url if =1, in some cases where the backend keeps current page in session, this is mandatory to force page=1 when the user really clicks on the link rather than getting an old page param. It doesn't harm anyway!
Allow paginate and page_entries_info to accept total_count and total_pages because the gem internally generates slow queries to compute them. The user code may calculate them in a much faster way and send them along. A better fix is to really optimize the internal queries and totally discard this fix!