Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> writes:
> On 09/27/2012 06:30 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Having said all that, I don't think we have a lot of choices here.
>> A "tar format" output option that isn't actually tar format has hardly
>> any excuse to live at all.
> I agree, but it's possibly worth pointing out that GNU tar has no
> trouble at all processing the erroneous format, and the "file" program
> on my Linux system has no trouble recognizing it as a tar archive.
Well, they're falling back to assuming that the file is a pre-POSIX
tarfile, which is why you don't see string user/group names for
instance.
> Nevertheless, I think we should fix all live versions of pg_dump make
> all live versions of pg-restore accept both formats.
I think it's clear that we should make all versions of pg_restore accept
either spelling of the magic string. It's less clear that we should
change the output of pg_dump in back branches though. I think the only
reason we'd not get complaints about that is that not that many people
are relying on tar-format output anyway. Anybody who is would probably
be peeved if version 8.3.21 pg_restore couldn't read the output of
version 8.3.22 pg_dump.
regards, tom lane
