Re: pg_controldata gobbledygook

--On 25. April 2013 23:19:14 -0400 Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> I think I've heard of scripts grepping the output of pg_controldata for
> this that or the other. Any rewording of the labels would break that.
> While I'm not opposed to improving the labels, I would vote against your
> second, abbreviated scheme because it would make things ambiguous for
> simple grep-based scripts.

I had exactly this kind of discussion just a few days ago with a customer,
who wants to use the output in their scripts and was a little worried about
the compatibility between major versions.

I don't think we do guarantuee any output format compatibility between
corresponding symbols in major versions explicitly, but given that
pg_controldata seems to have a broad use case here, we should maybe
document it somewhere wether to discourage or encourage people to rely on
it?

--
Thanks

Bernd