Tom> while giving something at least passable in the cases
that are broken today.
Would you mind adding an explicit "encoding" field to the error message?
At least it would give clear explanation how to parse that message without resorting to a guess dance.
The biggest problem is client has no idea how to parse backend error messages. If implementing client_encoding properly is too hard at this point in time, then I would rather have "encoding field" right in the startup error message.
That "encoding" field would enable sending properly localized messages in the future if "pre-connect client_encoding" would be implemented somehow.
Vladimir