On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 9:51 AM, Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> wrote:
> We used to have a bug/lackoffeature in pg_dump at the 2GB boundary as > well, IIRC, specifically on Win32. Maybe you were hit by that one..
Yes, possibly. I didn't even know how to make a compressed plain dump, but that doesn't really plea my case :/
> i do have one suggestion. > pg_restore only gives a user this feedback, when he makes this > mistake:"pg_restore: [archiver] input file does not appear to be a valid > archive". > > Would it be feasible for pg_restore to detect that it is a different pg_dump > format and inform the user about it?
The main one you'd want to detect is plain I think - and I don't know if we can reliably detect that. It could be just a generic textfile, after all - how would we know the difference?
Well, on linux you could make pg_dump run /usr/bin/file on the file to see what kind it is. If it is gzipped, suggest that it might be a gzipped plain dump, if it is plain text, suggest that it might be a plain dump (etc, also bzip2). That's all. You don't have to be sure that it is valid, just say a bit more than "does not appear to be a valid archive". Help a user in a bad situation.
Only, i know that postgres runs on many platforms, so you probably can't run /usr/bin/file on all of those (or might not be installed on linux machine). So it probably should be part of pg_restore itself.
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