All, While reviewing and considering the patch to add the --no-blobs option to pg_dump, which I entirely agree with, I came across our claim that passing -b to pg_dump would cause blobs to be output, regardless of other options set.
To wit, our docs specifically say: ---- Include large objects in the dump. This is the default behavior except when --schema, --table, or --schema-only is specified, so the -b switch is only useful to add large objects to selective dumps. ---- However, a 'pg_dump -s -b' won't include blobs, which appears to be due to the masking performed in _tocEntryRequired() whereby we strip the REQ_DATA out if we are in schema-only mode. Further, though perhaps less surprising, we don't include blobs when --section=post-data is set, and only the definition of the blob (but no data) when --section=pre-data is used. This appears to go back at least as far as all currently supported branches. We have a few options here. The documentation says 'selective dumps', which we could infer to mean 'dumps where the user specified a table' or similar and exclude 'schema-only' from that case. I don't believe this was the original intent, given this comment in pg_dump.c: /* * Dumping blobs is now default unless we saw an inclusion switch or -s * ... but even if we did see one of these, -b turns it back on. */ Given the lack of field complaints about this, I'm pretty tempted to just adjust that comment and the documentation. Alternativly, we could hack things up in a simimlar manner to what was done in a7e5457, and cause blobs to be dumped even in schema-only mode if -b is passed. Thoughts? Thanks! Stephen
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