> FWIW I don't understand why would they need to write parsers.
It's quite common to write unit tests for VM recipes/playbooks wheen using tools like Chef etc, parsing and checking the installed/generated files is part of that. This would be one very real use case for writing a parser.
Consider pgAdmin and the many other tools which essentially embed pg_dump and pg_restore. There’s no shortage of use cases for a variety of tools to be able to understand, read, parse, generate, rewrite, and probably do more, with such a pg_dump/restore config file.
> I think the case when the filter file needs to be modified is rather rare - it certainly is not what the original use case Pavel tried to address needs. (I know that customer and the filter would be generated and used for a single dump.)
I'm not convinced that basing design decisions on a single customer reference who only want to use the code once is helpful.
