Re: \du quite ugly in 8.4

2009/11/2 Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com>:
> Peter Eisentraut wrote:
>> As a compromise, we could keep the combined "Attributes" column but
>> replace the line breaks by commas.  This would at least get rid of the
>> confusing and ugly line breaks in the common cases.
>
> That works for me.

Mmm, perhaps we were a little too hasty about employing the improved
multiline support in psql when we implemented this feature.

I personally don't see what Peter dislikes about the output ... to me
the example he posted is far more readable with linebreaks than it
would be without, but the original thread [1] didn't provoke a lot of
discussion. I think it's likely that a lot of people just plain
missed the thread and are only now seeing the new output as they try
out 8.4. I suppose it's inevitable that some of them won't like it.

Will fewer people take offense if we change it to commas? Perhaps.
It might be worth giving it a try just to see what the reaction is,
but I won't be astonished if we get a similar ratio of people annoyed
by the change regardless of whether we use commas or linebreaks.

Cheers,
BJ

[1] http://archives.postgresql.org/message-id/9543.1203007337@sss.pgh.pa.us