Re: pg_waldump: support decoding of WAL inside tarfile

Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com> writes:
> Anyway, given the defaults, GNU tar + ZFS/BTRFS users must be pretty
> unlikely to hit this in the wild, and the symptom is a confusing error
> in a maintenance tool, not corruption, so I don't think this is a big
> deal.  I might still try teaching the astreamer code to understand PAX
> 1.0 when it sees it in the next cycle though, for the benefit of
> FreeBSD users.

I agree that this isn't too critical if the effects are confined to
pg_waldump.  I believe that pg_basebackup and pg_verifybackup also use
astreamer_tar.c, but it's not clear to me if they'd ever be asked to
parse files made by tar(1) and not by our own sparseness-ignorant
tar-writing code.  If they can be, that'd be a higher-priority reason
to fill in this gap.

            regards, tom lane