Most popular questions on every topic are the simplest ones. Imagine a parallel universe where this patch is contained in the codebase - I argue this question about exiting the repl still is the top one, albeit with less votes.
On Sat, Dec 9, 2017 at 3:56 AM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Dec 8, 2017 at 8:57 AM, Daniel Vérité" <daniel@manitou-mail.org> wrote: >> When looking at the most popular postgres questions on stackoverflow: >> >> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/postgresql?sort=votes >> >> the first one (most up-voted) happens to be: >> >> "How to exit from PostgreSQL command line utility: psql" >> >> now at 430k views and 1368 upvotes. > > Wow, that's pretty crazy. I was going to vote against this proposal, > but I think I might change my mind. How can we say that this isn't a > problem for users given that data? It's evidently not only *a* > problem, but arguably the biggest one.
That's an impressive number, indeed. And an argument about potentially doing something.
Far less concrete, I can tell you this: Over the last 10 years, I've averaged teaching ~ 2 PG classes per quarter to students from every background: Database (you name it), OS admin, developer, consultant, etc...
I have the students use pgbench to generate some data, run some queries and pg_dump it.
EVERY single class has at least one:
postgres=# \dt
List of relations
Schema | Name | Type | Owner
--------+------------------+-------+----------
public | pgbench_accounts | table | postgres
public | pgbench_branches | table | postgres
public | pgbench_history | table | postgres
public | pgbench_tellers | table | postgres
(4 rows)
postgres=# exit
postgres-# pg_dump
postgres-# pg_dump
postgres-# pg_dump
postgres-# pg_dump --help
postgres-# ls
postgres-# cd
postgres-# exit
postgres-# quit
postgres-#
It's not just usability, it's a point of serious frustration for seasoned database people.