On Fri, Jul 27, 2018 at 12:51 PM, Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 26, 2018 at 11:46 PM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > > Andres Freund <and...@anarazel.de> writes: > >> Is there any real reason to retain it? > > > > As I recall, the principal argument for having it to begin with was > > that it's a "non proprietary" format that could be read without any > > PG-specific tools. Perhaps the directory format could be said to > > serve that purpose too, but if you were to try to collapse a directory > > dump into one file for transportation, you'd have ... a tar dump. > > > > I think a more significant question is what we'd get by removing it? > > If you want to look around for features that are slightly less used > > than other arguably-equivalent things, we must have hundreds of those. > > Doesn't mean that those features have no user constituency. > > Yeah. I don't mind removing really marginal features to ease > maintenance, but I'm not sure that this one is all that marginal or > that we'd save that much maintenance by eliminating it. I used > text-format dumps for years primarily because I figured that no matter > what happened, I'd always be able to find some way of getting my data > out of a text file. Ideally the PostgreSQL tools will always work, > but if they don't work and you have a text file, you have > alternatives. If they don't work and you have a format in some > PostgreSQL-specific format, then what? > But he isn't proposing getting rid of -Fp, just -Ft. Isn't -Ft is just as PostgresSQL-specific as -Fd is? Cheers, Jeff
