From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: David G. Johnston <david.g.johnston@gmail.com>
Cc: Chao Li <li.evan.chao@gmail.com>
Cc: Álvaro Herrera <alvherre@kurilemu.de>
Cc: PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: Add \pset options for boolean value display
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2025 23:37:12 -0400
Message-ID: <417647.1761017832@sss.pgh.pa.us> (raw)
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"David G. Johnston" <david.g.johnston@gmail.com> writes:
> On Monday, October 20, 2025, David G. Johnston <david.g.johnston@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> Sympathetic to the concern but opposed to taking on such responsibility.
>> They could probably modify their own query to do that if they really wanted
>> to fool someone and I’m having trouble accepting this happening by
>> accident. Do we test for yes/no; oui/non (i.e., foreign language choices);
>> checkmark/X?
> Actually, preventing t/f makes sense to me. Prevents a “hacker” from
> messing with the default outputs in a hard-to-identify manner. Any other
> value would point to pset being used.
-1. Yeah, you could reject "\pset true 'f'", but what about
not-obviously-different values such as 'f ', or f with a non-breaking
space, or f with a tab, or yadda yadda yadda?
I went on record as opposed to this entire idea back at the start of
this thread, precisely because I was worried that it could lead to
confusion. And I remain of the opinion that it's not a great idea.
But if we're going to do it, let's not bother with any fig-leaf
proposals that pretend to partially guard against confusion.
regards, tom lane
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Cc: tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us, david.g.johnston@gmail.com, li.evan.chao@gmail.com, alvherre@kurilemu.de, pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Add \pset options for boolean value display
In-Reply-To: <417647.1761017832@sss.pgh.pa.us>
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