Re: pg_dump superflous warning message

Bill Moran <wmoran(at)potentialtech(dot)com> writes:
> If I do:
> pg_dump -a --disable-triggers

> I get a warning message:
> pg_dump: NOTICE: there are circular foreign-key constraints among these table(s):
> pg_dump: directory
> pg_dump: You may not be able to restore the dump without using --disable-triggers or temporarily dropping the constraints.
> pg_dump: Consider using a full dump instead of a --data-only dump to avoid this problem.

> Of course, this was confusing as hell -- we spent a good bit of time
> trying to figure out why pg_dump wasn't honoring --disable-triggers.

> It turns out that it is, it's just that it prints the warning even
> when it's not applicable.

Yeah, the low-level routine that prints the warning doesn't have ready
access to knowledge of whether that switch has been given. I'm not
sure it's worth doing anything about it, considering all the different
corner cases involved (in particular text vs archive output). It'd
be way too easy to suppress the message in cases where it was actually
relevant :-(

regards, tom lane