On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 12:55 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> 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.
There's no real point to using the tar format in pg_dump, really, is
there? Which is why I think most people just don't use it.
pg_basebackup in tar format is a much more useful thing, of course...
So we could fix just pg_basebackup in backbranches (since we never
read anything, it shouldn't be that big a problem), and then do
pg_dump in HEAD only?
-- Magnus HaganderMe: http://www.hagander.net/Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/
