I have pushed this fix, except that instead of parsing the OID from the dropStmt as in your patch, I used te->catalogId.oid, which is much simpler.
yes, it is much better
I tested this by pg_restoring to 8.4 (which doesn't have pg_largeobject_metadata); there is no error raised:
LOG: sentencia: SELECT CASE WHEN EXISTS(SELECT 1 FROM pg_catalog.pg_largeobject WHERE loid = '43748') THEN pg_catalog.lo_unlink('43748') END;
In 9.0 the command is the new style:
LOG: sentencia: SELECT pg_catalog.lo_unlink(oid) FROM pg_catalog.pg_largeobject_metadata WHERE oid = '43748';
So it's all fine. I guess it's fortunate that we already had the DropBlobIfExists() function.
Now a further problem I notice is all the *other* commands for which we inject the IF EXISTS clause; there is no support for those in older servers, so they throw errors if --if-exists is given in the pg_restore line. I think we can just say that --if-exists is not supported for older servers; as Heikki said, we don't promise that pg_dump is compatible with older servers anyway. In my test database, several commands errored out when seeing the EXTENSION in CREATE EXTENSION IF EXISTS. So we're okay now.