Re: QSoC proposal: Rewrite pg_dump and pg_restore

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 4:09 AM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> Craig Ringer <craig(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> > Here's how I think it needs to look:
> > [ move all the functionality to the backend ]
>
> Of course, after you've done all that work, you've got something that is
> of exactly zero use to its supposed principal use-case, pg_dump. pg_dump
> will still have to support server versions that predate all these fancy
> new dump functions, and that pretty much ensures that most of pg_dump's
> core functionality will still be on the client side. Or, if you try to
> finesse that problem by making sure the new server APIs correspond to
> easily-identified pieces of pg_dump code, you'll probably end up with APIs
> that nobody else wants to use :-(.
>
>
Or you should mandate that new server versions should be able to consume
_old_ pg_dump version output. This would change the recommended "when
upgrading, dump using the new pg_dump" to ""when upgrading, dump using the
old pg_dump".

This would be necessary policy going forward anyway, if most of the pg_dump
functionality was server-side, because it would be generating dumps in the
server-version dump format, not the client-version format.

'Regards
Marcin Mańk
(goes back to lurker cave...)