Re: documenting the backup manifest file format

On 4/14/20 1:27 PM, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> On 2020-Apr-14, David Steele wrote:
> 
>> On 4/14/20 12:56 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
>>
>>> Hmm, did David suggest that before? I don't recall for sure. I think
>>> he had some suggestion, but I'm not sure if it was the same one.
>>
>> "I'm also partial to using epoch time in the manifest because it is
>> generally easier for programs to work with.  But, human-readable doesn't
>> suck, either."
> 
> Ugh.  If you go down that road, why write human-readable contents at
> all?  You may as well just use a binary format.  But that's a very
> slippery slope and you won't like to be in the bottom -- I don't see
> what that gains you.  It's not like it's a lot of work to parse a
> timestamp in a non-internationalized well-defined human-readable format.

Well, times are a special case because they are so easy to mess up. Try 
converting ISO-8601 to epoch time using the standard C functions on a 
system where TZ != UTC. Fun times.

Regards,
-- 
-David
david@pgmasters.net