Re: WIP: URI connection string support for libpq

Greg Smith <greg@2ndQuadrant.com> writes:

Thank you for the review, Greg!

> Given that, there really isn't a useful path forward that helps out
> all those developers without supporting both prefixes.  That's where
> this left off before, I just wanted to emphasize how clear that need
> seems now.

OK, I've used the code from your earlier review to support the short
prefix.  I sincerely hope we don't make the situation any worse by being
flexible about the prefix...

> Next thing, also mentioned at that Flask page.  SQLite has
> standardized the idea that sqlite:////absolute/path/to/foo.db is a URI
> pointing to a file.  Given that, I wonder if Alex's syntax for
> specifying a socket file name might adopt that syntax, rather than
> requiring the hex encoding:  postgresql://%2Fvar%2Fpgsql%2Ftmp/mydb
> It's not a big deal, but it would smooth another rough edge toward
> making the Postgres URI implementation look as close as possible to
> others.

Yeah, this is really appealing, however how do you tell if the part
after the last slash is a socket directory name or a dbname?  E.g:

psql postgres:///path/to/different/socket/dir        (default dbname)
psql postgres:///path/to/different/socket/dir/other  (dbname=other ?)

If we treat the whole URI string as the path to the socket dir (which I
find the most intuitive way to do it,) the only way to specify a
non-default dbname is to use query parameter:

psql postgres:///path/to/different/socket/dir?dbname=other

or pass another -d flag to psql *after* the URI:

psql [-d] postgres:///path/to/different/socket/dir -d other

Reasonable?

> So far I've found only one syntax that I expected this to handle that
> it rejects:
>
> psql -d postgresql://gsmith@localhost
>
> It's picky about needing that third slash, but that shouldn't be hard
> to fix.

Yeah, good that you've spotted it.  If my reading of the URI RFC (2396)
is correct, the question mark and query parameters may follow the
hostname, w/o that slash too, like this:

psql -d postgresql://localhost?user=gsmith

So this made me relax some checks and rewrite the code a bit.

> I started collecting up all the variants that do work as an initial
> shell script regression test, so that changes don't break something
> that already works.  Here are all the variations that already work,
> setup so that a series of "1" outputs is passing:
>
[snip]

Yes, the original code was just a bit too picky about URI component
separators.  Attached also is a simplified test shell script.

I have also added a warning message for when a query parameter is not
recognized and being ignored.  Not sure if plain fprintf to stderr is
accepted practice for libpq, please correct if you have better idea.

--
Regards,
Alex