Simon Riggs <simon@2ndQuadrant.com> writes:
> On 21 March 2014 20:58, Noah Misch <noah@leadboat.com> wrote:
>> It's not the behavior I would choose for a new product, but I can't see
>> benefits sufficient to overturn previous decisions to keep it.
> Speechless
The key argument for not "fixing" this is that it would break existing
pg_dump files. That's a pretty hard argument to overcome, unfortunately,
even if you're willing to blow off the possibility that client
applications might contain similar shortcuts. We still do our best to
read dump files from the 7.0 era (see ConvertTriggerToFK() for one example
of going above and beyond for that); and every so often we do hear of
people trying to get data out of such ancient servers. So even if you
went and fixed pg_dump tomorrow, it'd probably be ten or fifteen years
before people would let you stop reading dumps from existing versions.
regards, tom lane