Re: [HACKERS] pg_basebackup: Allow use of arbitrary compression program

Hello,

Back in pg 9.2, we hacked a copy of pg_basebackup to add a command
line option which would allow the user to specify an arbitrary
external program (potentially including arguments) to be used to
compress the tar backup.

Our motivation was to be able to use pigz (parallel gzip
implementation) to speed up the compression. It also allows using
tools like bzip2, xz, etc instead of the inbuilt zlib.

I never ended up submitting that upstream, but now it looks like I
will have to repeat the exercise for 9.6, so I was wondering if such a
feature would be welcomed.