Stephen Frost <sfr...@snowman.net> writes: > First, I'd like to clarify what I believe Tom's suggestion is, and then > talk through that, as his vote sways this topic pretty heavily.
> Tom, I take it your suggestion is to have '-f -' be accepted to mean > 'goes to stdout' in all branches? Yes. > That goes against the argument that > we don't want to break existing scripts, as it's possible that there are > existing scripts that depend on '-f -' actually going to a './-' file. While that's theoretically possible, I think that the number of cases where somebody is actually expecting that is epsilon. It seems more useful to tell people that they can now use "-f -" in all branches, and it's required to use it as of v12. Alternatively, we could revoke the requirement to use "-f -" in 12, and wait a couple releases before enforcing it. The fundamental problem here is that we tried to go from "-f - doesn't work" to "you must use -f -" with no grace period where "-f - is optional". In hindsight that was a bad idea. > If you meant for all branches to accept '-f -' and have it go to a './-' > file then that's just a revert of this entire change, which I can't > agree with either No, I'm not proposing a full revert. But there's certainly room to consider reverting the part that says you *must* write "-f -" to get output to stdout. regards, tom lane