Re: proposal: possibility to read dumped table's name from file

Greetings,

* Tom Lane (tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us) wrote:
> Dean Rasheed <dean.a.rasheed@gmail.com> writes:
> > Actually, that raises a different possible benefit of passing options
> > in an options file -- if the user wants to pass in a table name
> > pattern, it can be a nuisance if the shell's argument processing does
> > additional unwanted things like globbing and environment variable
> > substitutions. Using an options file could provide a handy way to
> > ensure that any option values are interpreted exactly as written,
> > without any additional mangling.
> 
> Huh?  Any format we might devise, or borrow, will have to have some
> kind of escaping/quoting convention.  The idea that "we don't need
> that" tends to lead to very ugly workarounds later.

Agreed.

> I do agree that the shell's quoting conventions are pretty messy
> and so those aren't the ones we should borrow.  We could do a lot
> worse than to use some established data format like JSON or YAML.
> Given that we already have src/common/jsonapi.c, it seems like
> JSON would be the better choice of those two.

JSON doesn't support comments, something that's really useful to have in
configuration files, so I don't agree that it's a sensible thing to use
in this case.  JSON also isn't very forgiving, which is also
unfortunate and makes for a poor choice.

This is why I was suggesting TOML up-thread, which is MIT licensed, has
been around for a number of years, supports comments, has sensible
quoting that's easier to deal with than the shell, and has a C (C99)
implementation.  It's also used in quite a few other projects.

In a quick look, I suspect it might also be something that could be used
to replace our existing hand-hacked postgresql.conf parser and give us
the ability to handle things a bit cleaner there too...

Thanks,

Stephen