Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2021 09:40:13 -0400
From: Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com>,
	Tomas Vondra <tomas.vondra@enterprisedb.com>,
	Daniel Gustafsson <daniel@yesql.se>,
	Pavel Stehule <pavel.stehule@gmail.com>,
	Justin Pryzby <pryzby@telsasoft.com>,
	Dean Rasheed <dean.a.rasheed@gmail.com>,
	Surafel Temesgen <surafel3000@gmail.com>,
	vignesh C <vignesh21@gmail.com>,
	PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: proposal: possibility to read dumped table's name from file
Message-ID: <20210713134013.GF20766@tamriel.snowman.net>
References: <202107122259.n6o5uwb5erza@alvherre.pgsql>
 <3183720.1626131795@sss.pgh.pa.us>
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Greetings,

* Tom Lane (tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us) wrote:
> Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
> > [1] your proposal of "[+-] OBJTYPE OBJIDENT" plus empty lines allowed
> >     plus lines starting with # are comments, seems plenty.  Any line not
> >     following that format would cause an error to be thrown.
>=20
> I'd like to see some kind of keyword on each line, so that we could extend
> the command set by adding new keywords.  As this stands, I fear we'd end
> up using random punctuation characters in place of [+-], which seems
> pretty horrid from a readability standpoint.

I agree that it'd end up being bad with single characters.

> I think that this file format should be designed with an eye to allowing
> every, or at least most, pg_dump options to be written in the file rather
> than on the command line.  I don't say we have to *implement* that right
> now; but if the format spec is incapable of being extended to meet
> requests like that one, I think we'll regret it.  This line of thought
> suggests that the initial commands ought to match the existing
> include/exclude switches, at least approximately.

I agree that we want to have an actual config file that allows just
about every pg_dump option.  I'm also fine with saying that we don't
have to implement that initially but the format should be one which can
be extended to allow that.

> Hence I suggest
>=20
> 	include table PATTERN
> 	exclude table PATTERN
>=20
> which ends up being the above but with words not [+-].

Which ends up inventing yet-another-file-format which people will end up
writing generators and parsers for.  Which is exactly what I was arguing
we really should be trying to avoid doing.

I definitely feel that we should have a way to allow anything that can
be created as an object in the database to be explicitly included in the
file and that means whatever we do need to be able to handle objects
that have names that span multiple lines, etc.  It's not clear how the
above would.  As I recall, the proposed patch didn't have anything for
handling that, which was one of the issues I had with it and is why I
bring it up again.

Thanks,

Stephen

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