Re: Patch: psql \whoami option

On Jan 27, 2010, at 8:08 AM, Magnus Hagander wrote:

> 2010/1/27 David Christensen <david@endpoint.com>:
>>
>> On Jan 27, 2010, at 4:01 AM, Magnus Hagander wrote:
>>
>>> 2010/1/27 Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>:
>>>>
>>>> On 1/26/10 3:24 PM, David Christensen wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> -hackers,
>>>>>
>>>>> In the spirit of small, but hopefully useful interface improvement
>>>>> patches, enclosed for your review is a patch for providing psql  
>>>>> with a
>>>>> \whoami command (maybe a better name is \conninfo or similar).   
>>>>> Its
>>>>> purpose is to print information about the current connection, by  
>>>>> default
>>>>> in a human-readable format.  There is also an optional format  
>>>>> parameter
>>>>> which currently accepts 'dsn' as an option to output the current
>>>>> connection information as a DSN.
>>>
>>> On a first note, it seems like the check for the parameter "dsn"  
>>> isn't
>>> "complete". Without testing it, it looks like it would be possible  
>>> to
>>> run "\whoami foobar", which should give an error.
>>
>> Yeah, I debated that; right now, it just ignores any output it  
>> doesn't know about and spits out the human-readable format.
>
> yeah, that's not very forwards-compatible. Someone uses it in the
> wrong way, and suddenly their stuff gets broken if we choose to modify
> it in the future. If we say we're only going ot accept two options,
> let's enforce that and show an error/help message if the user typos.

That's a good point about forward-compatibility.  In that case, I'm  
not sure if "default" is the best name for the human-readable format,  
but I didn't like "human-readable" ;-).  I assume that should have an  
explicit spelling, and not just be the format that we get if we don't  
otherwise specify.  Ideas, anyone?

Regards,

David
--
David Christensen
End Point Corporation
david@endpoint.com