This new option instructs initdb to skip synchronizing any files
in database directories, the database directories themselves, and
the tablespace directories, i.e., everything in the base/
subdirectory and any other tablespace directories. Other files,
such as those in pg_wal/ and pg_xact/, will still be synchronized
unless --no-sync is also specified. --no-sync-data-files is
primarily intended for internal use by tools that separately ensure
the skipped files are synchronized to disk. A follow-up commit
will use this to help optimize pg_upgrade's file transfer step.
The --sync-method=fsync implementation of this option makes use of
a new exclude_dir parameter for walkdir(). When not NULL,
exclude_dir specifies a directory to skip processing. The
--sync-method=syncfs implementation of this option just skips
synchronizing the non-default tablespace directories. This means
that initdb will still synchronize some or all of the database
files, but there's not much we can do about that.