On Thu, Jun 12, 2025 at 10:18:56AM -0400, Robert Haas wrote: > On Fri, Jun 6, 2025 at 11:40 AM Nathan Bossart <nathandboss...@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
