Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
> [1] your proposal of "[+-] OBJTYPE OBJIDENT" plus empty lines allowed
> plus lines starting with # are comments, seems plenty. Any line not
> following that format would cause an error to be thrown.
I'd like to see some kind of keyword on each line, so that we could extend
the command set by adding new keywords. As this stands, I fear we'd end
up using random punctuation characters in place of [+-], which seems
pretty horrid from a readability standpoint.
I think that this file format should be designed with an eye to allowing
every, or at least most, pg_dump options to be written in the file rather
than on the command line. I don't say we have to *implement* that right
now; but if the format spec is incapable of being extended to meet
requests like that one, I think we'll regret it. This line of thought
suggests that the initial commands ought to match the existing
include/exclude switches, at least approximately.
Hence I suggest
include table PATTERN
exclude table PATTERN
which ends up being the above but with words not [+-].
regards, tom lane