Re: Alternative to \copy in psql modelled after \g

Hello Tom,

>> Fixing the problem envolves deciding what is the right behavior, and
>> update the documentation and the implementation accordingly. Currently the
>> documentation suggests that :ERROR is about SQL error (subject to
>> interpretation), and the implementation is more or less consistent with
>> that view, but not always, as pointed out by Daniel.
>
> FWIW, I think we should adopt the rule that :ERROR reflects any error
> condition, whether server-side or client-side.

I think that everybody agrees with that.

> It's unlikely that scripts would really not care about client-side 
> errors.  Moreover, I do not think we can reliably tell the difference; 
> there are always going to be corner cases that are hard to classify. 
> Example: if we lose the server connection, is that a server-side error 
> or client-side? Or maybe neither, maybe the network went down.
>
> Because of this concern, I find the idea of inventing separate
> SQL_ERROR and CLIENT_ERROR variables to be a pretty terrible one.

Then the committer is right:-)

> I think we'd be creating a lot of make-work and hard choices for
> ourselves, to do something that most script writers won't give a
> fig about.  If you've got subtle error-handling logic in mind,
> you shouldn't be trying to implement your app in a psql script
> in the first place, IMO anyway.

Possibly. I was also thinking of debug. ISTM that SQL_ERROR is pretty 
trivial to implement because we already set SQLSTATE, and SQL_ERROR is 
probably something like SQLSTATE != "0000" or close to that.

> It's unclear to me whether to push ahead with Daniel's existing
> patch or not.  It doesn't look to me like it's making things
> any worse from the error-consistency standpoint than they were
> already, so I'd be inclined to consider error semantics cleanup
> as something to be done separately/later.

Fine.

> BTW, it looks to me like the last patch is still not right as far
> as when to close copystream --- won't it incorrectly close a
> stream obtained from pset.copyStream?

Argh, I should have checked this point.

-- 
Fabien.