From: Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>
To: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
Cc: Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org>
Cc: pgsql-hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Cc: pgsql@j-davis.com
Subject: Re: pg_dump --with-* options
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2025 09:52:40 -0500
Message-ID: <aErpuM6RXSlK1FBW@nathan> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CA+TgmoactJEUHeXuxHLKNXHzm6-XrQFigPur-4nHTMFSiSRkiQ@mail.gmail.com>
References: <7cc52488-f876-4ad3-affd-6e4b0ef0cb09@eisentraut.org>
<aEMLzPQtjRbj2R7X@nathan>
<CA+TgmoactJEUHeXuxHLKNXHzm6-XrQFigPur-4nHTMFSiSRkiQ@mail.gmail.com>
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@gmail.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
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To: pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Cc: nathandbossart@gmail.com, robertmhaas@gmail.com, peter@eisentraut.org, pgsql@j-davis.com
Subject: Re: pg_dump --with-* options
In-Reply-To: <aErpuM6RXSlK1FBW@nathan>
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