Re: QSoC proposal: Rewrite pg_dump and pg_restore

On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 8:41 PM, Alexandr <askellio(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Rewrite (add) pg_dump and pg_restore utilities as libraries (.so, .dll &
> .dylib)

This strikes me as (1) pretty vague and (2) probably too hard for a
summer project.

I mean, getting the existing binaries to build libraries that you can
call with some trivial interface that mimics the existing command-line
functionality of pg_dump might be doable, but that's not all that
interesting. What people are really going to want is a library with a
sophisticated API that lets you do interesting things
programmatically. But that's going to be hard. AFAIK, nobody's even
tried to figure out what that API should look like. Even if we had
that worked out, a non-trivial task, the pg_dump source code is a
mess, so refactoring it to provide such an API is likely to be a job
and a half.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company