Re: Proposal: new border setting in psql

On Sat, 2008-08-23 at 14:42 -0400, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> 
> D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote:
> > On Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:04:07 -0400
> > "D'Arcy J.M. Cain" <darcy@druid.net> wrote:
> >   
> >>> There's still the question of whether this covers any needs that aren't
> >>> met just as well by XML or CSV output formats.
> >>>       
> >> Well, we could remove all the display formats except XML.  After all,
> >> it can always be converted to any other format.  Of course we wouldn't
> >> do that. User convenience is all I'm thinking of.
> >>     
> >
> > Well, Tom has raised a question about its need and Asko has questioned
> > whether it should be under a different setting but so far no one has
> > outright rejected the proposal.  Does anyone else have an opinion?  I am
> > attaching a patch for further review.  
> >
> >   
> 
> 
> In general I think I prefer machine readable formats to be produces by 
> the backend so they are available through all clients, not just psql.

ReST is both human-readable format and machine readable format.

Where should this come from ?

> That said, this has sufficiently low impact that I'm not going to be 
> vastly upset if we let it through.
> 
> I think we should probably confine ourselves to output formats that are 
> in very wide use or we'll be supporting a vast multitude. CSV and XML 
> both qualify here - not sure that ReST does.

ReST is just one variant of TEXT - also a format which is in very wide
use :)

I mean, XML is just a meta-format, like TEXT, unless we start to
formalize our XML, provide DTD-s, etc.

----------------
Hannu