>> I humbly request on behalf of those who manage production postgresql >> instances that we change the default backup file format from -Fp to -Fc.
> I'm a bit worried about it breaking peoples scripts as well, if they > pipe the output.
Whether they pipe the output or not, this will break people's scripts. I agree it's a legacy behavior that we wouldn't choose again, but you could say that about an awful lot of things including much of the SQL standard. I think it's too late to consider this now.
Just a thought: If it's the right thing to do, why not do it in small steps?
For example, couldn't we deprecate the behavior on 9.4, and switch over in
9.5? By deprecate I mean a warning message on STDERR making it clear
they're relying on behavior that is scheduled to change.
I don't think there's any precedence in postgres or it's tooling of this kind of
deprecation process, but it seems we need to define something like it.
