Re: Defaulting psql to ON_ERROR_ROLLBACK=interactive

On Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 2:29 AM, Peter van Hardenberg <pvh(at)pvh(dot)ca> wrote:
> Ads and I were talking over breakfast about usability issues and he
> mentioned transaction cancellation during interactive sessions as a serious
> pain point.
>
> I suggest we update the default of ON_ERROR_ROLLBACK to interactive for
> 10.0.
>
> The last discussion I could find about this subject was in 2011 and while
> there was concern about setting the default to "on" (as this would tamper
> with the expected behaviour of scripts), I don't see any identification of a
> problem that would be caused by setting it to "interactive" by default.

Well, then you'd get one behavior when you use psql interactively, and
another behavior when you use it from a script. And if you used a
client other than psql the behavior would be different from psql.
Plus, it's kinda surprising to have a client that, by default, is
sending secret commands to the server that you don't know about. And
it's a backward-incompatible change against previous releases. I
don't think any of that makes this the worst idea ever, but on balance
I still think it's better to just recommend to people that they
configure their .psqlrc with this setting if they want the behavior.

In short, -1 from me.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company