psql's tab completions for ALTER command

On Tue, Dec 10, 2002 at 09:04:07PM +0100, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Alvaro Herrera writes:
>
> > Would it work to make \d tab-completable in a way that showed both the
> > commands that are available and the objects they describe? e.g.
> >
> > \d<tab> would show something like
> > \dt [tables] \ds [sequences] \dv [views] ...
>
> That won't work. The actual completion and the view of the alternatives
> if the completion is ambiguous is driven by the same data.
>

Speaking of psql and tab completion, I ran into a bogosity in ALTER
yesterday, in ver 7.3. I was looking to change the ownership of a table,
so I did:

ALTER TABLE foo <tab>
ADD ALTER RENAME

Hmm, so maybe it's ALTER again? (I don't rember that syntax, but ...)

ALTER TABLE doo ALTER <tab>
GROUP SCHEMA TABLE USER

huh? ALTER TABLE foo ALTER TABLE?

<checks \h ALTER and \h ALTER TABLE>

Seems ALTER TABLE foo <tab> should yield:

ADD DROP ALTER RENAME OWNER TO

And ALTER <tab> (which currently gives GROUP SCHEMA TABLE USER)
should have:

DATABASE GROUP TABLE TRIGGER USER

And ALTER TABLE foo ALTER <tab>
should list column names of foo.

Digging into the source, I see this case was there, but you couldn't
reach it because of the match on ALTER.

I've sent a patch to PATCHES to implement my proposed completions, with
the caveat that they're based on the \h ALTER output, and manual testing,
not on reading the parser in detail.

Ross