Re: small windows psqlrc re-wording

On Thu, Jul 28, 2022 at 10:04:12AM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Julien Rouhaud <rjuju123(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > On Wed, Jul 27, 2022 at 02:42:11PM -0400, Robert Treat wrote:
> >> The attached patch tweaks the wording around finding the psqlrc file
> >> on windows, with the primary goal of removing the generally incorrect
> >> statement that windows has no concept of a home directory.
>
> > Windows only has a concept of home directory since Vista, so that used to be
> > true.
> > Anyway, since we don't support XP or anything older since about 3 weeks ago
> > (495ed0ef2d72a6a74def296e042022479d5d07bd), +1 for the patch.
>
> If all supported versions do have home directories now, should we
> instead think about aligning the Windows behavior with everywhere
> else?

As far as I know the expected usage on Windows is still different. Even with
home directories application are still expected to put stuff in %APPDATA% (1),
in a dedicated directory. That's especially important since there is still no
concept of "hidden" files and the explorer still hides the extensions by
default. I can however see that having a file named ".something" is now mostly
working, which IIRC wasn't really the case the last time I used Windows (around
XP).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_folder#File_system_directories