A main concern among most (all?) participants of the thread, regardless of format supported, is that quoting is hard and must be done right for all object names postgres support (including any not currently in scope by this patch).
Just a small note - when quoting is calculated to design, then the implementation is easy. I am sure, so my last code covers all possibilities, and it is about 100 lines of code.
Below is an attempt at summarizing and grouping the proposals so far into the set of ideas presented:
A) A keyword+object based format to invoke with a switch to essentially allow for more filters than the commandline can handle and nothing more. After a set of revisions, the current proposal is: [include|exclude] [<objtype>] [<objident>]
B) A format similar to (A) which can also be used for pg_dump configuration
C) The format in (A), or a close variant thereof, with the intention of it being included in/referred to from a future configuration file of currently unknown format. One reference being a .gitignore type file.
D) An existing format (JSON and TOML have been suggested, with JSON being dismissed due to lack of comment support) which has quoting conventions that supports postgres' object names and which can be used to define a full pg_dump configuration file syntax.
For B), C) and D) there is implicit consensus in the thread that we don't need to implement the full configuration file as of this patch, merely that it *must* be possible to do so without having to paint ourselves out of a corner.
At this point it seems to me that B) and C) has the broadest support. Can the C) option may represent the compromise between "simple" format for object filtering and a more structured format for configuration? Are there other options?
