"Jim C. Nasby" <jnasby@pervasive.com> writes:
> Having to change the types to shells, then drop the IO, then drop the
> type seems like a 'gotcha' and a bunch of needless extra work.
Depends. From pg_dump's perspective it's easier to do it that way,
because it drives all this from a reverse-dependency-order traversal
of the objects. If dropping the type magically makes the functions
go away then you'd want to somehow suppress the DROP commands for the
functions, and it's not clear how to do that, or what unpleasant
side-effects it might have (I can think of at least one place in
pg_restore that assumes all ownable objects have DROP commands in a
dump ...)
regards, tom lane