Re: pg_basebackup vs. Windows and tablespaces

On 11/13/14 11:52 AM, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> Amit Kapila wrote:
>
>> This patch is in "Ready for committer" stage for more than 1.5 months.
>> I believe this is an important functionality such that without this tar
>> format of pg_basebackup is not usable on Windows. I feel this
>> will add a value to pg_basebackup utility and moreover the need
>> and design has been agreed upon the list before development.
>>
>> Can any Committer please have a look at this patch?
>
> Is this still relevant after this commit?
>
> commit fb05f3ce83d225dd0f39f8860ce04082753e9e98
> Author: Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net>
> Date: Sat Feb 22 13:38:06 2014 -0500
>
> pg_basebackup: Add support for relocating tablespaces

I believe so.

The commit only applies to "plain" output. Amit's complaint is that tar
utilities on Windows don't unpack symlinks, so the "tar" format isn't
useful on Windows when tablespaces are used. So he wants the recovery
mechanism to restore the symlinks.

I'm not fully on board with that premise. (Get a better tar tool.
Submit a patch.)

But this also ties in with the recent discovery that the tar format
cannot handle symlinks longer than 99 bytes. So this patch could also
fix that problem by putting the untruncated name of the symlink in the
WAL data.