On tor, 2011-05-26 at 16:54 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> But if you want to take such an extension into account right now,
> maybe we ought to design that feature now. What are you seeing it as
> looking like?
>
> My thought is that "-z" should just mean "give me compression; a good
> default compression setting is fine". "-Zn" could mean "I want gzip
> with exactly this compression level" (thus making the presence or
> absence of -z moot). If you want to specify some other compression
> method altogether, use something like --lzma=N. It seems unlikely to
> me that somebody who wants to override the default compression method
> wouldn't want to pick the settings for it too.
I think of pg_basebackup as analogous to tar. tar has a bunch of
options to set a compression method (-Z, -z, -j, -J), but no support for
setting compression specific options. So in that sense that contradicts
your suspicion.