>AFAICS a lot of people compare pg_dump diffs. If we apply this patch, it would break those applications.
Well, as it already mentioned by Peter in above old mail thread that "a diff of the same database made by different (major) versions of pg_dump will already be different in most situations, so adding the pg_dump version number in it is essentially free from this perspective"
So I don't think there will be any issue with application break.
>Also, it is *already* available if you add verbose option (which is sufficient to satisfy those that want the client and/or >server version) in plain mode (the other modes already include the desired info by default). In the past, timestamps were removed to avoid noise in diffs.
Verbose option do include timestamps which will fail while comparing. Also Verbose has too many details which may not be interested by people but I guess more people will clearly wanted to see the server and client version.
Thus I see this patch is useful and thus reviewed it.
Sorry, I don't understand which application will break? Can you give me more detail information? Timestamps always vary which do affect the diff. But I can't imagine why adding the version will affect the pg_dump diffs. I don't think the version number vary frequently.
Review comments:
1. Patch applies cleanly. make/make install/make check all are fine. 2. No issues fine as such in my unit testing. 3. As Tom suggested, pg_dump > foo is giving identical output to pg_dump -Fc | pg_restore > foo
Basically only the code lines are re-arranged and thus it has NO affect on system as such. So no issues found and as per me it is good to go in.
However following code chunk looks weird:
+ else + { + ahprintf(AH, "\n"); + }
You need extra line when NOT verbose mode but you don't need that when it is verbose mode. This is just because of the fact that dumpTimestamp() call in verbose mode adds an extra line. Can't we remove this else all-together and print extra line unconditionally ? Also can we remove curly braces in if and else near these code changes ?