On Jul 21, 2010, at 12:31 PM, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> Excerpts from Peter Eisentraut's message of mié jul 21 10:24:26 -0400 2010:
>> On tis, 2010-07-20 at 11:48 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
>>> It's tempting to propose making .psqlrc apply only in interactive
>>> mode, period. But that would be an incompatibility with previous
>>> releases, and I'm not sure it's the behavior we want, either.
>>
>> What is a use case for having .psqlrc be read in noninteractive use?
>
> Even if there weren't one, why does it get applied to -f but not -c?
> They're both noninteractive.
So not to let the thread drop, it appears that we're faced with the following
situation:
1) The current behavior is inconsistent with the psqlrc handling of -c and -f.
2) The current behavior is still historical and we presumably want to maintain
it.
I'm not sure of the cases where we're willing to break backwards compatibility,
but I do know that it's not done lightly. So perhaps for this specific patch,
we'd need/want to punt supporting both -c's in conjunction with -f's, at least
until we can resolve some of the ambiguities in what the actual behavior should
be in each of these cases. This could still be a followup patch for 9.1, if we
get these issues resolved.
And as long as we're redesigning the bike shed, I think a better use case for
supporting multiple sql files would be to support them in such a way that you
wouldn't need to provide explicit -f flags for each. Many programs utilize the
'--' token for an "end of options" flag, with the rest of the arguments then
becoming something special, such as filenames. So what about adding the
interpretation that anything after '--' is interpreted as a filename? That
will allow the use of shell wildcards to specify multiple files, and thus allow
something like:
$ psql -U myuser mydatabase -- *.sql
$ psql -- {pre-,,post-}migration.sql
while still being unambiguous with the current convention of having an
unspecified argument be interpreted as a database name. This would make it
possible to actually specify/use multiple files in a fashion that people are
used to doing, as opposed to having to explicitly type things out or do
contortions will shell substitutions, etc.
Regards,
David
--
David Christensen
End Point Corporation
[email protected]
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