pg_dump: add option to ignore TABLE DATA for failed TABLE object creation

Hi PostgreSQL developers,

some time ago I started a discussion [1] here about modifying pg_dump
to not restore TABLE DATA objects if the corresponding TABLE oject
failed to be created (usually because it already exists, but it might
fail due to a different error like a nonexisting data type). We need
this to provide automatic major version upgrades for databases with
extensions like PostGIS. Tom's reply [3] seemed to indicate that this
was not entirely crackful, so I implemented his approach, and after
some feedback I now have a fairly clean patch that works very well.

The patch was scheduled for review and inclusion [4], and indeed the
page had the patch for a while, but after some time it vanished.

Can you please reconsider this? If there is still a problem with the
patch, I'd like to work on it until it meets your standards.

For your convenience I attach the current patch version; a test script
[5] is also available (the ML kills shell script attachments, so I put
it on a Debian server). It does not alter the default behaviour, it
just adds a new option -X no-data-for-failed-tables. If you think this
mode should be the default, I'm happy to change it that way.

Thank you a lot!

Martin

[1] http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2006-02/msg00694.php
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/351571
[3] http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2006-02/msg00716.php
[4] http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2006-02/msg01253.php
[5] http://people.debian.org/~mpitt/test-pg_restore-existing.sh

--
Martin Pitt http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer http://www.ubuntu.com
Debian Developer http://www.debian.org

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