Hello Tom,
This is one of the patches already marked as RFC (since September by
Alvaro). Anyone interested in actually pushing it, so that it does not
fall through to yet another commitfest?
TBH, I think we'd be better off to reject it. This makes a nontrivial
change in a very long-standing psql behavior, with AFAICS no way to
get back the old semantics. (The thread title is completely misleading
about that; there's no "option" in the patch as it stands.)
The thread title was not misleading, the initial version of the patch did
offer an option. Then I was said "the current behavior is stupid (which I
agree), let us change it to the sane behavior without option", then I'm
told the contrary. Sigh.
I still have the patch with the option, though.
Sure, in a green field this behavior would likely be more sensible ...
but that has to be weighed against the fact that it's behaved the way it
does for a long time, and any existing scripts that are affected by that
behavior have presumably deliberately chosen to use it.
I cannot imagine many people actually relying on the current insane
behavior.
I can't imagine that changing this will make very many people happier.
It seems much more likely that people who are affected will be unhappy.
The compatibility issue could be resolved by putting in the option
that I suppose was there at the beginning.
Indeed.
But then we'd have to have a debate about which behavior would be
default,
The patch was keeping current behavior as the default because people do
not like a change whatever.
and there would still be the question of who would find this to
be an improvement. If you're chaining together commands with \; then
it's likely that you are happy with the way it behaves today.
Certainly there's been no drumbeat of bug reports about it.
Why would there be bug report if this is a feature? :-)
The behavior has been irritating me for a long time. It is plain stupid to
be able to send queries but not see their results.
--
Fabien.
