Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org> writes:
> I have never understood what's the point of having an option to force a
> password prompt. I wonder why don't we deprecate -W?
It's not *completely* useless, because you only need one connection
attempt not two --- normally, psql gets rejected once before figuring
out that it must ask for a password. You can imagine scenarios with
slow internet connections, or a badly overloaded database, where it
might be worth the keystrokes to type -W.
OTOH, you can also avoid the two-attempts syndrome with a ~/.pgpass
file.
On balance I'm not for deprecating it, but pointing out that it's
normally useless doesn't seem out of line...
regards, tom lane