Re: about EDITOR_LINENUMBER_SWITCH

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com> writes:
> Excerpts from Tom Lane's message of mar may 24 17:11:17 -0400 2011:
>> Right. It would also increase the cognitive load on the user to have
>> to remember the command-line go-to-line-number switch for his editor.
>> So I don't particularly want to redesign this feature. However, I can
>> see the possible value of letting EDITOR_LINENUMBER_SWITCH be set from
>> the same place that you set EDITOR, which would suggest that we allow
>> the value to come from an environment variable. I'm not sure whether
>> there is merit in allowing both that source and ~/.psqlrc, though
>> possibly for Windows users it might be easier if ~/.psqlrc worked.

> If we're going to increase the number of options in .psqlrc that do not
> work with older psql versions, can I please have .psqlrc-MAJORVERSION or
> some such? Having 8.3's psql complain all the time because it doesn't
> understand "linestyle" is annoying.

1. I thought we already did have that.

2. In any case, EDITOR_LINENUMBER_SWITCH isn't a hazard for this,
because older versions will just think it's a variable without any
special meaning.

But the real question here is whether we want to change it to be also
(or instead?) an environment variable.

regards, tom lane