Re: Schema version management

On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 4:46 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> Ick. Then we have to deal with all the downsides of *both* methods.
>
> pg_dump is already a bloated, nearly unmaintainable mess. The very
> last thing it needs is even more options.

When you say bloated, are you referring to the code or the command line
interface?

If you are referring to the code, I don't think that's a good argument
against implementing new good features.
The important ratio is the value of a feature compared to the increased
complexity.
In this case, it's very simple to implement both the --split option and the
fixing of dump order.
I'm not even a C coder and managed to implement it within less of an hour
effective coding.
We are talking ~100 lines of code, with comments and everything.

If you are referring to the command line interface and think it is bloated,
maybe the options should be hidden in the normal --help.
We could create a new --help-advanced text, where we could put these
options, and all other existing less common options.
I think this is a quite common and good way to handle the situation for
UNIX command line tools.