Re: pg_dump --with-* options

On Thu, Jun 12, 2025 at 10:18:56AM -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 6, 2025 at 11:40 AM Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Jun 06, 2025 at 09:14:32AM +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
>> > What is the purpose of the --with-data option? Dumping the data is the
>> > default. Is this to override an earlier --no-data option?
>>
>> I believe the idea is that these will allow folks to be explicit about what
>> they want instead of needing to understand the defaults for every
>> component.
>
> Am I too late to propose ripping this out?
>
> I mean, if I look at pg_dump --help and there are options for
> --with-broccoli and --without-mushrooms, I know that the defaults are
> no brocooli, yes mushrooms, and I know which options I need to specify
> to get the behavior that I want, whatever that happens to be. If all
> options exist in both forms, it's a lot more confusing. Maybe there's
> some issue of cross-version compatibility here that justifies this
> complexity, but I don't see what it would be. I would think
> --with-data has always been the default and always will be, so we just
> don't need --with-data for anything. But maybe I'm confused.

If the idea is to remove all options for default behavior, we'd be removing
--no-statistics, --with-data, and --with-schema at this point. Maybe we
could go a step further and even rip out --statistics-only (in favor of
--no-schema --no-data --with-statistics). In general, I do think the list
of pg_dump options is pretty unwieldy at this point.

--
nathan