On 5/15/20 10:17 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> David Steele <david@pgmasters.net> writes:
>> On 5/15/20 9:34 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
>>> I vote for following the backup_label precedent; that's stood for quite
>>> some years now.
>
>> Of course, my actual preference is to use epoch time which is easy to
>> work with and eliminates the possibility of conversion errors. It is
>> also compact.
>
> Well, if we did that then it'd be sufficiently different from the backup
> label as to remove any risk of confusion. But "easy to work with" is in
> the eye of the beholder; do we really want a format that's basically
> unreadable to the naked eye?
Well, I lost this argument before so it seems I'm in the minority on
easy-to-use. We use epoch time in the pgBackRest manifests which has
been easy to deal with in both C and Perl, so experience tells me it
really is easy, at least for programs.
The manifest (to me, at least) is generally intended to be
machine-processed. For instance, it contains checksums which are not all
that useful unless they are checked programmatically -- they can't just
be eye-balled.
Regards,
--
-David
david@pgmasters.net