Re: pg_dump quietly ignore missing tables - is it bug?

Pavel Stehule <pavel.stehule@gmail.com> writes:
> other variant, I hope better than previous. We can introduce new long
> option "--strict". With this active option, every pattern specified by -t
> option have to have identifies exactly only one table. It can be used for
> any other "should to exists" patterns - schemas. Initial implementation in
> attachment.

I think this design is seriously broken.  If I have '-t foo*' the code
should not prevent that from matching multiple tables.  What would the use
case for such a restriction be?

What would make sense to me is one or both of these ideas:

* require a match for a wildcard-free -t switch

* require at least one (not "exactly one") match for a wildcarded -t switch.

Neither of those is what you wrote, though.

If we implemented the second one of these, it would have to be controlled
by a new switch, because there are plausible use cases for wildcards that
sometimes don't match anything (not to mention backwards compatibility).
There might be a reasonable argument for the first one being the
default behavior, though; I'm not sure if we could get away with that
from a compatibility perspective.
        regards, tom lane