Re: patch for parallel pg_dump

Joachim Wieland <joe@mcknight.de> writes:
> I know that you took back some of your comments, but I'm with you
> here. Archive is allocated as an ArchiveHandle and then casted back to
> Archive*, so you always know that an Archive is an ArchiveHandle. I'm
> all for getting rid of Archive and just using ArchiveHandle throughout
> pg_dump which would get rid of these useless casts.

I'd like to see a more thoroughgoing look at the basic structure of
pg_dump.  Everybody who's ever looked at that code has found it
confusing, with the possible exception of the original author who is
long gone from the project anyway.  I don't know exactly what would make
it better, but the useless distinction between Archive and ArchiveHandle
seems like a minor annoyance, not the core disease.

Not that there'd be anything wrong with starting with that.
        regards, tom lane