Re: Making tab-complete.c easier to maintain

On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 12:15:01PM -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 11:16 AM, David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> wrote:
> > Proprietary, secret changes to the back end, sure, but the client?
> > The most recent example I recall of that is Netezza, and I suspect
> > that they just couldn't be bothered to publish the changes they
> > made. At that time, the community psql client was not by any
> > means as nice as it is now, so it's conceivable that they made
> > substantive improvements, at least for talking to Netezza DBs.
> >
> >> Most have added backend features and I guess many of those have
> >> in turn added support to psql for those features. Sure it'd
> >> probably in reality be relatively harmless for them to release
> >> these psql modifications, but I rather doubt their management
> >> will generally see it that way.
> >
> > Is it really on us as a community to go long distances out of our
> > way to assuage the baseless[1] paranoia of people who are by and
> > large not part of our community?
>
> I was under the impression that I was part of this community, and I
> have already said that my employer has added tab completion support,
> and other psql features, related to the server features we have
> added.
>
> Also, your statement that this is a long distance out of our way
> does not seem to be justified by the facts.

As I wrote in the part you cut, we can continue to pretend libedit is
a viable alternative if it keeps some feathers unruffled. If libedit
"support" gets to be a real drag, we can and should reconsider with a
strong bias to dropping it.

Cheers,
David.

P.S. With a little luck, our next license or other perceived legal
conflict will be as easy to sort out as this one. I have the sinking
feeling that anything we do with crypto or hashing more secure than
MD5 will run afoul of someone's idea of what the law is in their
country, and the impacts will be a lot nastier than this. We will
need to deal with that separately, as needs arise.
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
Phone: +1 415 235 3778 AIM: dfetter666 Yahoo!: dfetter
Skype: davidfetter XMPP: david(dot)fetter(at)gmail(dot)com

Remember to vote!
Consider donating to Postgres: http://www.postgresql.org/about/donate