Re: [HACKERS] proposal: psql command \graw

On Fri, Dec 1, 2017 at 12:16 AM, Michael Paquier
<michael(dot)paquier(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 11, 2017 at 12:57 AM, Pavel Stehule <pavel(dot)stehule(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> 2017-11-10 16:38 GMT+01:00 Fabien COELHO <coelho(at)cri(dot)ensmp(dot)fr>:
>>> So I switched the patch to "ready for committer".
>>
>> Thank you very much
>
> Patch moved to CF 2018-01 with same status: ready for committer.

I vote to reject this patch. It doesn't do anything that you can't
already do; it just adds some syntactic sugar. And that syntactic
sugar saves only a handful of keystrokes. If you want unaligned,
tuples-only mode, you can set it in 5 keystrokes:

rhaas=# \a\t
Output format is unaligned.
Tuples only is on.

If you use this command, it takes 4 keystrokes; instead of ending your
command with a semicolon (1 character) you end it with \graw (5
characters).

Now, granted, \graw lets you set those options for a single command
rather than persistently, but I'm just not very interested in having a
bunch of \g<whatever> options that enable various combinations of
options. Soon we'll have a thicket of \g variants that force
whichever combinations of options particular developers like to use,
and if \graw is any indication, the \g<whatever> variant won't
necessarily look anything like the normal way of setting those
options. And that's not easy to fix, either: \graw could be spelled
\gat since it forces \a on and \t on, but somebody's bound to
eventually propose a variant that sets an option that has no
single-character shorthand.

I'm not going to be bitterly unhappy if somebody else decides to
commit this, but to me it looks like it gains us very little.

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