Re: Usability fail with psql's \dp command

Fabien COELHO <coelho(at)cri(dot)ensmp(dot)fr> writes:
> My 0.02¤: this creates an exception for anyone trying to parse the output.
> I would have preferred empty logically meaning no rights, and the default
> being spelled out explicitely.

Uh, who'd be trying to parse the output of \dp?

The reason we provide psql's -E option is so that people can look at the
underlying queries and adapt them to their own purposes. In many cases,
that would include stripping out provisions that make the output more
human-friendly and less machine-friendly. (Localization of output words
is one obvious example of things that psql does that are quite
machine-parsing-unfriendly.) This seems to me to be another such case.

We could certainly consider the explicit-default approach (and it's one
of the options I suggested), but to my mind we should evaluate the
options entirely on what humans find readable, with exactly zero weight
to machine readability.

regards, tom lane