Re: Deprecating, and scheduling removal of, pg_dump's tar format.

Andres Freund <andres@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.

            regards, tom lane