Re: Non-text mode for pg_dumpall

On 2025-08-23 Sa 9:08 PM, Noah Misch wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 30, 2025 at 02:51:59PM -0400, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>> OK, now that's reverted we should discuss how to proceed. I had two thoughts
>> - we could use invent a JSON format for the globals, or we could just use
>> the existing archive format. I think the archive format is pretty flexible,
>> and should be able to accommodate this. The downside is it's not humanly
>> readable. The upside is that we don't need to do anything special either to
>> write it or parse it.
> I would first try to use the existing archiver API, because that makes it
> harder to miss bugs. Any tension between that API and pg_dumpall is likely to
> have corresponding tension on the pg_restore side. Resolving that tension
> will reveal much of the project's scope that remained hidden during the v18
> attempt. Perhaps more important than that, using the archiver API means
> future pg_dump and pg_restore options are more likely to cooperate properly
> with $SUBJECT. In other words, I want it to be hard to add pg_dump/pg_restore
> features that malfunction only for $SUBJECT archives. The strength of the
> archiver architecture shows in how rarely new features need format-specific
> logic and how rarely format-specific bugs get reported. We've had little or
> no trouble with e.g. bugs that appear in -Fd but not in -Fc.

Yeah, that's what we're going to try.

cheers

andrew

--
Andrew Dunstan
EDB:https://www.enterprisedb.com