> OK, so COLUMNS should take precedence. I assume this is going to
> require us to read the COLUMNS enviroment variable in psql _before_
> readline sets it, and that COLUMNS will only affect screen output, like
> ioctl(). Is that consistent?
>
This whole thing is confusing enough at the point, I think a complete
proposal needs to be articulated. It is hard to comment on a fragment of
an idea.
The main cases to cover are: (1) how to specify wrap for tty's (2) how
to specify wrap for pipes (3) how to get wraped on platforms that don't
have the ioctl (presumably windows without cygwin) (4) how to set up
different defaults for tty's and pipes (e.g. wrap interactive tty's, but
leave output aligned for scripts).
And perhaps, as a bonus comment on (5) the idea of having psql NOT
source .psqlrc
I hope at some point someone will actually try the actual core wrapping
code, and comment on it.
-Bryce