Re: Proposal: new border setting in psql

On Thu, 21 Aug 2008 15:03:23 -0400
Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> "D'Arcy J.M. Cain" <darcy(at)druid(dot)net> writes:
> > I would like to propose a new border setting.
>
> That code is horrendously overcomplicated and unreadable already :-(
> I'm not too eager to add more variants to it.

Actually, I already made the code changes and they were surprisingly
simple.

> > The reason for this is to allow the output to be fed directly into any
> > system using Restructured text as described in
> > http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickref.html.
>
> Is that *really* going to work? What about quoting/escaping
> conventions?

ReST is pretty good with that stuff.

> Also, how many of those "any systems" actually exist? Markup
> conventions are a dime a dozen.

That I can't say. My impression was that it was reasonably well
known. However, while ReST was *my* reason for proposing this it was
also important to me that the format stand by itself. I think it
does. It also follows the documentation in that it is an extension to
border 2 but with more borders, just like border 2 is more than border
1, etc. It's a consistent progression.

> On the whole I think it ought to be sufficient to support XML output
> for people who want easily-machine-readable query output.

Perhaps. The problem is that it still means running it through an
external program. That's fine for scripted processes but not for ad
hoc queries.

Perhaps what we really need is the ability for users to install their
own formatting functions. After all, we can define everything else.

--
D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy(at)druid(dot)net> | Democracy is three wolves
http://www.druid.net/darcy/ | and a sheep voting on
+1 416 425 1212 (DoD#0082) (eNTP) | what's for dinner.