Re: Re: [COMMITTERS] pgsql: Don't override arguments set via options with positional argumen

On 04/18/2012 10:03 AM, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> On ons, 2012-04-18 at 09:53 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Peter Eisentraut<peter_e@gmx.net>  writes:
>>> My vote is to revert this altogether and leave it be.  In the
>>> alternative, make it an error.
>> You mean in HEAD too?  I don't agree with that, for sure.  What this
>> patch is accomplishing is to make sure that the less-commonly-used
>> programs have similar command-line-parsing behavior to psql and pg_dump,
>> where we long ago realized that failure to check this carefully could
>> result in very confusing behavior.  (Especially on machines where
>> getopt is willing to rearrange the command line.)
> OK, if you care strongly about that, make it an error.  But don't just
> ignore things.


It won't be ignored. It will be caught by the "too many arguments" logic.

The case where repeated arguments should be disallowed is a similar but 
different case that probably demands a much larger patch. I don't think 
its existence militates against this fix, however.


>
>> I agree with Andrew that this is a bug fix.  I can see the argument
>> for not applying it to back branches, but not for declaring that it's
>> not a bug.
> We shouldn't be backpatching things that are merely confusing.  It works
> as designed at the time, after all.  Improvements belong in master.
>


If it was really intended to work this way then that's a piece of very 
poor design, IMNSHO. It looks to me much more like it was just an 
oversight.

I don't have terribly strong feelings about this, since we've not had 
lots of complaints over the years, so I'll revert it in the back branches.

cheers

andrew