Re: Patch: psql \whoami option

On Jan 27, 2010, at 8:08 AM, Magnus Hagander wrote:

> 2010/1/27 David Christensen <david(at)endpoint(dot)com>:
>>
>> On Jan 27, 2010, at 4:01 AM, Magnus Hagander wrote:
>>
>>> 2010/1/27 Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com>:
>>>>
>>>> On 1/26/10 3:24 PM, David Christensen wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> -hackers,
>>>>>
>>>>> In the spirit of small, but hopefully useful interface improvement
>>>>> patches, enclosed for your review is a patch for providing psql
>>>>> with a
>>>>> \whoami command (maybe a better name is \conninfo or similar).
>>>>> Its
>>>>> purpose is to print information about the current connection, by
>>>>> default
>>>>> in a human-readable format. There is also an optional format
>>>>> parameter
>>>>> which currently accepts 'dsn' as an option to output the current
>>>>> connection information as a DSN.
>>>
>>> On a first note, it seems like the check for the parameter "dsn"
>>> isn't
>>> "complete". Without testing it, it looks like it would be possible
>>> to
>>> run "\whoami foobar", which should give an error.
>>
>> Yeah, I debated that; right now, it just ignores any output it
>> doesn't know about and spits out the human-readable format.
>
> yeah, that's not very forwards-compatible. Someone uses it in the
> wrong way, and suddenly their stuff gets broken if we choose to modify
> it in the future. If we say we're only going ot accept two options,
> let's enforce that and show an error/help message if the user typos.

That's a good point about forward-compatibility. In that case, I'm
not sure if "default" is the best name for the human-readable format,
but I didn't like "human-readable" ;-). I assume that should have an
explicit spelling, and not just be the format that we get if we don't
otherwise specify. Ideas, anyone?

Regards,

David
--
David Christensen
End Point Corporation
david(at)endpoint(dot)com