Andrew,
AFAICT on a brief look at the patch, it doesn't affect the quoting of nulls on export, it just allows * as an alias for all columns for FORCE QUOTE (as well as FORCE NOT NULL). But FORCE QUOTE has never forced quoting of null values, only non-null values. We have never quoted null values, and I'm fairly resistant to any suggestion that we should.
See? That's what happens when I can't build the docs. ;-) (and there's no previous discussion of the feature).
As for importing data from programs that produce all values in quotes including null/missing values (your pro case above), arguably what we need is another flag that would turn an empty string into a null.
ooooh, TODO, please? There's a lot of this out there, and I've had to build sed into a lot of import routines.
-- Josh Berkus PostgreSQL Experts Inc. www.pgexperts.com -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers