Re: Simplifications for error messages related to compression

On Tue, Dec 20, 2022 at 11:12:22PM -0600, Justin Pryzby wrote:
> Yes, and its current users (basebackup) output a gzip file, right ?
>
> pg_dump -Fc doesn't output a gzip file, but now it's using user-facing
> compression specifications referring to it as "gzip".

Not all of them are compressed either, like the base TOC file.

> If you tell someone they can write -Z gzip, they'll be justified in
> expecting to see "gzip" as output.

That's the point where my interpretation is different than yours,
where I don't really see as an issue that we do not generate a gzip
file all the time in the output. Honestly, I am not sure that there
is anything to win here by not using the same option interface for all
the binaries or have tweaks to make pg_dump cope with that (like using
zlib as an extra alias). The custom, directory and tar formats of
pg_dumps have their own idea of the files to compress or not (like
the base TOC file is never compressed so as one can do a pg_restore
-l).
--
Michael