Re: Re: [GENERAL] pg_dump behaves differently for different archive formats

Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> writes:
> If we're going to change this, it seems to me that the only option would
> be to change the dump format... Just off-the-cuff, I'm wondering if we
> could actually not change the real 'format' but simply promote each ACL
> entry (and similar cases..) to top-level objects and declare that TOC
> entries should be single statements.

I don't think we want even more TOC entries, but it would not be
unreasonable to insist that the statement(s) within a TOC entry be
subdivided somehow. Essentially the payload of a TOC entry becomes
a list of strings rather than just one string.

That would mean that the problem could not be fixed for existing archive
files; but that seems OK, given the rather small number of complaints
so far.

If we had something like that, I'd be strongly inclined to get rid of
the existing convention whereby comments and ACL commands are separate
TOC entries, and make them part of the parent object's TOC entry (which'd
mean we'd want to label the sub-strings so we can tell whether they are
main object, comment, or ACL). The fewer TOC entries we can have, the
better; there is no reason why comments/ACLs should be independently
sortable.

regards, tom lane