Re: Display of timestamp in pg_dump custom format

On 04/09/14 08:13, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> On Thu, May 1, 2014 at 12:09:34PM -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
>> On Thu, May 1, 2014 at 12:33:51PM +1200, Gavin Flower wrote:
>>> On 01/05/14 12:04, Bruce Momjian wrote:
>>>> On Thu, May 1, 2014 at 08:27:49AM +1200, Gavin Flower wrote:
>>>>> On 01/05/14 02:51, Bruce Momjian wrote:
>>>>>> The table of contents for pg_restore -l shows the time the archive was
>>>>>> made as local time (it uses ctime()):
>>>>>>
>>>>>> ; Archive created at Wed Apr 30 10:03:28 2014
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Is this clear enough that it is local time? Should we display this
>>>>>> better, perhaps with a time zone designation?
>>>>>>
>>>>> I think it would be good to include the time zone, as we are all
>>>>> very international these days - and in Australia, adjacent states
>>>>> have different dates for the summer time transition!
>>>>>
>>>>> Personally, I would like to see the date in the format 2014-04-30,
>>>>> but having the day of the week is good.
>>>>>
>>>>> Milliseconds might be useful, if you want to check logs files.
>>>> OK, I will work on it for 9.5. Thanks.
>>>>
>>> So the it would then read something like:
>>>
>>> ; Archive created at Wed 2014-04-30 10:03:28.042 NZST
>>>
>>> (but with the correct appropriate time zone designation)?
>> I think we would use a numeric offset.
> I ended up going with the string-based timezone as I was worried that
> the sign of the timezone could easily confuse people because the SQL
> timezone offset sign is often different from the OS timezone. The new
> output is:
>
> ;
> ; Archive created at Wed Sep 3 16:12:21 2014 EST <--
> ; dbname: test
> ; TOC Entries: 8
> ; Compression: -1
> ; Dump Version: 1.12-0
> ; Format: CUSTOM
> ; Integer: 4 bytes
> ; Offset: 8 bytes
> ; Dumped from database version: 9.5devel
> ; Dumped by pg_dump version: 9.5devel
>
> Patch attached.
>
I would prefer the date in a sane numeric format to the left of the time
(similar to what I suggested above), easier to sort (if a sort is
required) - it is also easier to use regular expressions to select
statement in an arbitrary date/time range.

I don't always know in advance that I need to debug something, so I tend
to try and ensure that the relevant data is easy to find, even when I
currently don't expect ever to do so. This is a lesson that I have
learnt from over 40 years of commercial programming experience using a
variety of languages on a wide range of platforms.

Most likely, I will never need to worry about the precise format of
Archive statement output, but ...

Cheers,
Gavin