Laurenz Albe <laurenz.albe@cybertec.at> writes:
> On Mon, 2023-10-09 at 09:30 -0700, David G. Johnston wrote:
>> My point with the second paragraph is that we could, instead of documenting the
>> caveat about null printing as empty strings is to instead issue an implicit
>> "\pset null '<null>'" as part of these commands, and a "\pset null" afterward,
>> conditioned upon it not already being set to a non-empty value. IOW, the
>> special-casing we do today but actually do it in a way that distinguishes the
>> two cases instead of forcing them to be indistinguishable.
> -1
> The whole point of this patch is to make psql behave consistently with respect to
> NULLs in meta-commands. Your suggestion would subvert that idea.
Yeah. There is a lot of attraction in having \pset null affect these
displays just like all other ones. The fact that they act differently
now is a wart, not something we should replace with a different special
case behavior.
Also, I'm fairly concerned about not changing the default behavior here.
The fact that this behavior has stood for a couple dozen years without
many complaints indicates that there's not all that big a problem to be
solved. I doubt that a new default behavior will be well received,
even if it's arguably better.
regards, tom lane