Re: review: psql: edit function, show function commands patch

On Mon, Aug 02, 2010 at 11:34:02PM -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 11:17 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> > Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> >> On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 10:49 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>
> Well, it'd still work fine for \e foo. It'll just blow up for \e
> foo 3. My concern isn't really that things that which work now will
> break so much as that this new feature will fail to work for a large
> percentage of the people who try to use it, including virtually
> everyone who tries to use it on Win32.

That concern is a show-stopper.

> >> While this is superficially a Nice Thing to Have and I would
> >> certainly support it if +linenumber were relatively universal,
> >> it's really a pretty minor convenience when you come right down
> >> to it, and I am not at all convinced it is worth the hassle of
> >> trying to divine what piece of syntax will equip the user's
> >> choice of editor with the necessary amount of clue.
> >
> > The other approach we could take is that this whole thing is
> > disabled by default, and you have to set a psql variable
> > EDITOR_LINENUMBER_SWITCH to turn it on.  If you haven't read the
> > documentation enough to find out that variable exists, well, no
> > harm no foul.
>
> That might be reasonable. Right now the default behavior is to do
> +line on Linux and /line on Windows. But maybe a more sensible
> default would be to fail with an error message that says "you have
> to set thus-and-so variable if you want to use this feature". That
> seems better than sometimes working and sometimes failing depending
> on what editor the user has configured.
>
> A side question is whether this should be an environment variable or
> a psql variable.

I'd say "yes." As with $EDITOR/PSQL_EDITOR, there should be something
that looks for an overriding psql variable, drops through to look for
an environment variable, and then to a sane default, for some
reasonable value of "sane." Perhaps this default could depend on OS
(Windows vs. Everything Else) to start with.

Cheers,
David.
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