Re: refactoring basebackup.c

On Wed, Feb 16, 2022 at 11:11 AM Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org> wrote:
> This is hard to interpret for humans though because of the nested
> brackets and braces.  It gets considerably easier if you split it in
> separate variants:
>
>    -Z, --compress=[{client|server}-]{gzip|lz4}[:LEVEL]
>    -Z, --compress=LEVEL
>    -Z, --compress=none
>                          compress tar output with given compression method or level
>
>
> or, if you choose to leave the level-only variant undocumented, then
>
>    -Z, --compress=[{client|server}-]{gzip|lz4}[:LEVEL]
>    -Z, --compress=none
>                          compress tar output with given compression method or level
>
> There still are some nested brackets and braces, but the scope is
> reduced enough that interpreting seems quite a bit simpler.

I could go for that. I'm also just noticing that "none" is not really
a compression method or level, and the statement that it can only
compress "tar" output is no longer correct, because server-side
compression can be used together with -Fp. So maybe we should change
the sentence afterward to something a bit more generic, like "specify
whether and how to compress the backup".

-- 
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com