Re: backup manifests

On Mon, Mar 30, 2020 at 2:24 AM Amit Kapila <amit(dot)kapila16(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> > Between those two, I would use "pg_validatebackup" if there's a fair chance it
> > will end up doing the pg_waldump check. Otherwise, I would use
> > "pg_validatemanifest".
>
> +1.

I guess I'd like to be clear here that I have no fundamental
disagreement with taking this tool in any direction that people would
like it to go. For me it's just a question of timing. Feature freeze
is now a week or so away, and nothing complicated is going to get done
in that time. If we can all agree on something simple based on
Andres's recent proposal, cool, but I'm not yet sure that will be the
case, so what's plan B? We could decide that what I have here is just
too little to be a viable facility on its own, but I think Stephen is
the only one taking that position. We could release it as
pg_validatemanifest with a plan to rename it if other backup-related
checks are added later. We could release it as pg_validatebackup with
the idea to avoid having to rename it when more backup-related checks
are added later, but with a greater possibility of confusion in the
meantime and no hard guarantee that anyone will actually develop such
checks. We could put it in to pg_checksums, but I think that's really
backing ourselves into a corner: if backup validation develops other
checks that are not checksum-related, what then? I'd much rather
gamble on keeping things together by topic (backup) than technology
used internally (checksum). Putting it into pg_basebackup is another
option, and would avoid that problem, but it's not my preferred
option, because as I noted before, I think the command-line options
will get confusing.

--
Robert Haas
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