Re: garbage in psql -l

Oleg Bartunov <oleg(at)sai(dot)msu(dot)su> writes:
> why 8.4 has no real problem ?

Because we never tried to use utf8 table decoration before. This
is collateral damage from Roger Leigh's recent patches.

The problem is evidently that Oleg is depending on ~/.psqlrc to
set client_encoding the way he wants it, but that file does not
get read for a "psql -l" invocation. (Probably not for -c either.)

The locale environment really isn't at issue because we do not look
at it to establish client encoding. Perhaps Oleg should be setting
PGCLIENTENCODING instead of depending on ~/.psqlrc, but I suspect
he's not the only one doing it that way.

There has been some talk of altering the rules for setting psql's
default client_encoding. We could think about that, or we could
back off trying to use linestyle=unicode without an explicit setting.
If we do neither, I suspect we'll be hearing more complaints. I'll
bet there are lots of people who are using database encoding = UTF8
but don't actually have unicode-capable terminal setups. It's never
hurt them before, especially not if they aren't really storing any
non-ASCII data.

regards, tom lane