On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 10:49 PM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> writes: >> This is actually my biggest concern about this patch - that it may be >> just too much of a hassle to actually make it work for people. I just >> tried setting $EDITOR to MacOS's TextEdit program, and it turns out >> that TextEdit doesn't understand +. I'm afraid that we're going to >> end up with a situation where it only works for people using emacs or >> vi, and everyone else ends up with a broken install (and, possibly, no >> clear idea how to fix it). > > [ disclaimer: I've not looked at the proposed patch yet ] > > It seems like this ought to be fairly easily surmountable as long as > the patch is designed for failure.
It isn't. > The fallback position is just that > the line number does nothing, ie \ef foo just opens the editor and > doesn't try to position the cursor anywhere special; nobody can complain > about that because it's no worse than before. What we need is to not > try to force positioning if we don't recognize the editor. Supposing for the moment that we could make it work that way, that would be reasonable. > I'm tempted > to suggest forgetting about any user-configurable parameter and just > provide code that strcmp's the $EDITOR value to see if it recognizes the > editor name, otherwise do nothing. With all due respect, that sounds like an amazingly bad idea. Surely, we'll be forever getting patches to add $MYFAVORITEEDITOR to the list, or complaints that it's not already included. 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. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise Postgres Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
