On Mon, Jan 22, 2024 at 11:15 AM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> > Introduction of \gedit is interesting idea, but in this form it looks too
> > magic
>
> Yeah, I don't like it either --- it feels like something that belongs
> in an ETL tool not psql. The sheer size of the patch shows how far
> afield it is from anything that psql already does, necessitating
> writing tons of stuff that was not there before. The bits that try
> to parse the query to get necessary information seem particularly
> half-baked.
Based on these comments and the one from David Johnston, I think there
is a consensus that we do not want this patch, so I'm marking it as
Rejected in the CommitFest application. If I've misunderstood the
situation, then please feel free to change the status accordingly.
I feel slightly bad about rejecting this not only because rejecting
patches that people have put work into sucks but also because (1) I do
understand why it could be useful to have something like this and (2)
I think in many ways the patch is quite well-considered, e.g. it has
options like table and key to work around cases where the naive logic
doesn't get the right answer. But I also do understand why the
reactions thus far have been skeptical: there's a lot of pretty
magical stuff in this patch. That's a reliability concern: when you
type \gedit and it works, that's cool, but sometimes it isn't going to
work, and you're not always going to understand why, and you can
probably fix a lot of those cases by using the "table" or "key"
options, but you have to know they exist, and you have to realize that
they're needed, and the whole thing is suddenly a lot less convenient.
I think if we add this feature, a bunch of people won't notice, but
among those who do, I bet there will be a pretty good chance of people
complaining about cases that don't work, and perhaps not understanding
why they don't work, and I suspect fixing some of those complaints may
require something pretty close to solving the halting problem. :-(
Now maybe that's all wrong and we should adopt this patch with
enthusiasm, but if so, we need the patch to have significantly more +1
votes than -1 votes, and right now the reverse seems to be the case.
--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
