Mark Feit <mfeit@notonthe.net> writes:
> What precipitated the patch in the first place was a need to be able
> to do copies in-line to populate tables with small amounts of initial
> data.
Right, that's clearly useful. The debate at hand is about the
usefulness of the other behavior.
BTW, pg_dump scripts use COPY FROM STDIN (not \copy) to achieve this
same behavior of reading COPY data from the script file. Your patch was
thus not strictly necessary, since there was already a way to do what it
did --- but I accepted it anyway, since it seems reasonable that \copy
should be able to do it too.
What Bruce is suggesting is that we remove the old \copy behavior and
make it *only* able to do what COPY FROM STDIN does. That strikes me
as loss of important functionality ...
regards, tom lane