Greetings,
* Peter Eisentraut (peter.eisentraut@2ndquadrant.com) wrote:
> On 2020-03-10 18:38, Stephen Frost wrote:
> >>On 2/27/20 4:21 AM, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> >>>My opinion is that this is not particularly useful and not appropriate to
> >>>piggy-back onto \conninfo. Connection information including host, port,
> >>>database, user name is a well-established concept in PostgreSQL programs
> >>>and tools and it contains a delimited set of information. Knowing what
> >>>server and what database you are connected to also seems kind of
> >>>important. Moreover, this is information that is under control of the
> >>>client, so it must be tracked on the client side.
> >
> >I have to say that I disagree. Wishing to know when you connected to a
> >server is entirely reasonable and it's also rather clearly under control
> >of the client (though I don't entirely understand that argument in the
> >first place).
>
> The argument is that the server already knows when the client connected and
> that information is already available. So there is no reason for the client
> to also track and display that information, other than perhaps convenience.
Yes, it'd be for convenience.
> But the server does not, in general, know what host and port the client
> connected to (because of proxying and other network stuff), so this is
> something that the client must record itself.
I agree that there are some things the client has to track and not ask
the server for, because the server's answers could be different, but I
don't agree that conninfo should only ever include that info (and I
seriously doubt that was the original idea, considering 'database' is
included at least as far back as 1999..).
As a side-note, we should probably update our documentation for psql,
since the description of things under Prompting tends to presume that
there isn't anything between the client and the server (for example,
%> says "The port number at which the database server is listening.",
but it's really "The port number used to connect to the database
server." or something along those lines).
Thanks,
Stephen