Re: documenting the backup manifest file format

On 5/15/20 10:17 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> David Steele <david@pgmasters.net> writes:
>> On 5/15/20 9:34 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
>>> I vote for following the backup_label precedent; that's stood for quite
>>> some years now.
> 
>> Of course, my actual preference is to use epoch time which is easy to
>> work with and eliminates the possibility of conversion errors. It is
>> also compact.
> 
> Well, if we did that then it'd be sufficiently different from the backup
> label as to remove any risk of confusion.  But "easy to work with" is in
> the eye of the beholder; do we really want a format that's basically
> unreadable to the naked eye?

Well, I lost this argument before so it seems I'm in the minority on 
easy-to-use. We use epoch time in the pgBackRest manifests which has 
been easy to deal with in both C and Perl, so experience tells me it 
really is easy, at least for programs.

The manifest (to me, at least) is generally intended to be 
machine-processed. For instance, it contains checksums which are not all 
that useful unless they are checked programmatically -- they can't just 
be eye-balled.

Regards,
-- 
-David
david@pgmasters.net