I support to add the option, for I've been seeing too many of
our client got 'bad' dump just because they don't set PGCLIENTENCODING
correctly, (mostly because they use UTF8 as database encoding
but use some other encoding, like GBK as client encoding, but some
words break the autoconversion at present version and set
PGCLIENTENCODING to UTF8 would fix the problem).
Adding such a switch would remind DBAs there exists some encoding
conversion. In fact, I even think that we should use database encoding
to dump data regardless the PGCLIENTENCODING setting (unless
the user set the --encoding switch explicit), but I think
that might be break someone's application somewhere. :(
regards laser