Pushed 0001 with some changes of my own. I'm afraid I created a few conflicts for the later patches in your series; please rebase.
I don't think we introduced anything that would fail on old Perls, but let's see what buildfarm has to say. Others: Now is the time to raise concerns related to the proposed file formats and tooling, so please do have a look when you have a moment. At this stage, the proposed data format seems a good choice to me. Thanks -- Álvaro Herrera https://www.2ndQuadrant.com/ PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services