Re: fairywren is generating bogus BASE_BACKUP commands

On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 5:42 PM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> The point I was trying to make is that if we have to jump through
> that sort of hoop in the test scripts, then real users are going
> to have to jump through it as well, and they won't like that
> (and we will get bug reports about it). It'd be better to design
> the option syntax to avoid such requirements.

Well, as Andrew points out, pg_basebackup's -T foo=bar syntax causes
the same issue, so you'll need to redesign that, too. But even that is
not really a proper fix. The real root of this problem is that the
operating system's notion of a valid path differs from PostgreSQL's
notion of a valid path on this platform, and I imagine that fixing
that is a rather large project.

ISTM that you're basically just complaining about options syntax that
you don't like, but I think there's nothing particularly worse about
this syntax than lots of other things we type all the time. psql -v
VAR=VALUE -P OTHERKINDOFVAR=OTHERVALUE? curl -u USER:PASSWORD?
pg_basebackup -T OLD=NEW? perl -d[t]:MODULE=OPT,OPT? I mean, that last
one actually seems kinda horrible and if this were as bad as that I'd
say yeah, it should be redesigned. But I don't think it is. There's
plenty of precedent for bundling closely-related values into a single
command-line option, which is all I've done here.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com