Re: Deprecating, and scheduling removal of, pg_dump's tar format.

On Fri, Jul 27, 2018 at 12:51 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 26, 2018 at 11:46 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> > Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> writes:
> >> Is there any real reason to retain it?
> >
> > As I recall, the principal argument for having it to begin with was
> > that it's a "non proprietary" format that could be read without any
> > PG-specific tools. Perhaps the directory format could be said to
> > serve that purpose too, but if you were to try to collapse a directory
> > dump into one file for transportation, you'd have ... a tar dump.
> >
> > I think a more significant question is what we'd get by removing it?
> > If you want to look around for features that are slightly less used
> > than other arguably-equivalent things, we must have hundreds of those.
> > Doesn't mean that those features have no user constituency.
>
> Yeah. I don't mind removing really marginal features to ease
> maintenance, but I'm not sure that this one is all that marginal or
> that we'd save that much maintenance by eliminating it. I used
> text-format dumps for years primarily because I figured that no matter
> what happened, I'd always be able to find some way of getting my data
> out of a text file. Ideally the PostgreSQL tools will always work,
> but if they don't work and you have a text file, you have
> alternatives. If they don't work and you have a format in some
> PostgreSQL-specific format, then what?
>

But he isn't proposing getting rid of -Fp, just -Ft. Isn't -Ft is just as
PostgresSQL-specific
as -Fd is?

Cheers,

Jeff