Re: garbage in psql -l

Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> writes:
> On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 15:41, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> writes:
>>> FWIW, this patch also *completely* breaks the default windows
>>> installs, which will have the database in UTF-8 but there is *never*
>>> any UTF-8 support on the console (only UTF-16).
>>
>> Hmm ... so how do we work with utf-8 data in the database? That
>> should be the same case AFAICS.

> It breaks, yes :-), and you have to set the client encoding manually.

> But it works in the simple case where your data is ASCII for example.
> Which usually means it's fine for listing databases, or database
> objects, or such things. But with the unicode line patch, it's
> basically completely useless, not just partially annoying.

Right, so that's the Windows version of the comment I made that people
with ASCII-only data have not previously had to be very careful about
getting their locale/encoding environment lined up just so.

I'm now pretty well convinced that this patch is *not* worth the amount
of pain it will cause if it's invoked by default, no matter what
restrictions we try to place on that. We should just make the default
be linestyle=ascii, period.

A logically-separate issue that bears on this is whether to read .psqlrc
before doing -l/-c commands. I'm still concerned about that, but I
suppose we could tell people to add -X if it breaks things for them.

regards, tom lane