FWIW, I suspect very few people know about the verbosity setting (I didn't until a few months ago...) Maybe psql should hint about it the first time an error is reported in a session.
Actually, what'd be really handy IMO is something to regurgitate the most recent error in verbose mode, without making a permanent session state change. Something like
regression=# insert into bar values(1); ERROR: insert or update on table "bar" violates foreign key constraint "bar_f1_fkey" DETAIL: Key (f1)=(1) is not present in table "foo". regression=# \saywhat ERROR: 23503: insert or update on table "bar" violates foreign key constraint "bar_f1_fkey" DETAIL: Key (f1)=(1) is not present in table "foo". SCHEMA NAME: public TABLE NAME: bar CONSTRAINT NAME: bar_f1_fkey LOCATION: ri_ReportViolation, ri_triggers.c:3326 regression=#
Not sure how hard that would be to do within psql's current structure.
At first glance, it looks like it just means changing AcceptResult() to use PQresultErrorField in addition to PQresultErrorMessage, and stuffing the results somewhere. And of course adding \saywhat to the psql parser, but maybe someone more versed in psql code can verify that.
If it is that simple, looks like another good beginner hacker task. :)
Sorry, I couldn't resist it: I was too excited to learn such option existed. :-)
Please find attached a POC patch, using \errverbose for the command name. Unfortunately, I didn't see a good way to contain the change in psql only and had to change libpq, adding new interface PQresultBuildErrorMessage(). Also, what I don't like very much is that we need to keep track of the last result from last SendQuery() in psql's pset. So in my view this is sort of a dirty hack that works nonetheless.
