Re: proposal: psql –help reflecting service or URI usage

Hi Mark,

> On 28. Feb, 2021, at 17:54, Mark Dilger <mark(dot)dilger(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
>
> "definited" is a typo.

yes, definitely a typo, sorry. Thanks for pointing this out.

> Should this say "as defined in pg_service.conf"? That's the default, but the user might have $PGSERVICEFILE set to something else. Perhaps you could borrow the wording of other options and use "(default: as defined in pg_service.conf)", or something like that, but of course being careful to still fit in the line length limit.

I agree to all, thanks. What is the line length limit?

> Other client applications follow the same pattern as psql, so if this change were adopted, it should apply to all of them.

well, psql is central and IMHO the best place to start. I'd have to try out all of them then. What I do know, though, is that pg_isready does not understand a URI (why is that?), which is very unfortunate. So, I'd have to try them all out and supply patches for them all?

Still, supporting a feature and not documenting it in its help is IMHO not a good idea.

> Your proposal seems like something that would have been posted to the list before, possibly multiple times. Any chance you could dig up past conversations on this subject and post links here for context?

I don't know any past discussions here. I only subscribed today to psql-hackers. It might have been mentioned on psql-general, though. But I'm not sure. This idea popped into my mind just yesterday when I was playing around with psql and URIs and noticed that psql –help doesn't show them.

Cheers,
Paul