I'm not sure what the usual shape of 'consensus' or 'resolution' is in these things,
but it seems to me that the branch of this email thread that leads here (through the
message from Robert that I'm replying to) is the one that felt like it was converging.
I thought it was converging on the idea that
^[whitespace]*(quit|exit)[whitespace]*(;[whitespace]*)?$
would be treated specially when interactive, whether on a first or a continuation line,
and that the special treatment would be a helpful explanatory message to the
interactive user, while nevertheless appending the text to the query buffer.
One possibly not-yet-converged point was whether the special treatment should
be the same on a first line, or should just actually quit in that case.
None of this is what the currently latest patch does, though.
-Chap