Re: Proposal: new border setting in psql - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Alvaro Herrera
Subject Re: Proposal: new border setting in psql
Date
Msg-id 20090112123456.GE4919@alvh.no-ip.org
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Proposal: new border setting in psql  ("D'Arcy J.M. Cain" <darcy@druid.net>)
Responses Re: Proposal: new border setting in psql  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
List pgsql-hackers
D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote:
> So, what's happening.  Is this discussion going into Limbo again for
> six months.  It feels like the latest round of messages just went
> around the same circles as before.  Let me summarize the different
> possibilities as I see them.
> 
> 0. Drop this patch
> 1. Call it Rest and make it 100% compliant
> 2. Call it Rest-like
> 3. Call it simply border level 3
> 
> I don't think there are many supporting number 0 but...  I think
> everyone agrees that number 1 is difficult, perhaps impossible, to
> achieve so its supporters probably drop into 0 or 2.

My vote goes for 1.

I wonder why you think it's impossible.  Is it because you must scan
the whole table before being able to print any of it?  (For example to
add extra alignment for the escaping backslashes in a way that doesn't
render it invalid.)  Note that psql already does that in aligned mode,
to determine the wide of the columns.

I now consider the rst step much more braindamaged, but this makes it
all the more important that psql gets the output right; otherwise it is
much more painful for the user (it no longer suffices to add one
backslash to the offending row -- it is necessary to edit every single
line of the table to make it rst-compliant).

-- 
Alvaro Herrera                                http://www.CommandPrompt.com/
The PostgreSQL Company - Command Prompt, Inc.


pgsql-hackers by date:

Previous
From: "D'Arcy J.M. Cain"
Date:
Subject: Re: Proposal: new border setting in psql
Next
From: Gregory Stark
Date:
Subject: Re: about truncate