On Wed, 2023-08-30 at 12:00 +0200, Peter J. Holzer wrote:
> On 2023-08-29 14:44:48 -0600, Stuart McGraw wrote:
> > On 8/29/23 13:27, Tom Lane wrote:
> > > Fixing \dp to honor "\pset null" for this might be a reasonable
> > > thing to do too. I'm actually a bit surprised that that doesn't
> > > work already.
> >
> > That change would still require someone using \dp to realize that
> > the "Access privileges" value could be either '' or NULL (I guess
> > that could be pointed out more obviously in the psql doc), and then
> > do a '\pset null' before doing \dp? That seems a little inconvenient.
>
> Or just always do a \pset null. For me printing NULL the same as an
> empty string is just as confusing in normal tables, so that's the first
> line in my ~/.psqlrc. YMMV, of course.
>
> But I guess the point is that people who do \pset null expect to be able
> to distinguish '' and NULL visually and might be surprised if that
> doesn't work everywhere, while people who don't \pset null know that ''
> and NULL are visually indistinguishable and that they may need some
> other way to distinguish them if the difference matters.
>
> So +1 for me fixing \dp to honor "\pset null".
+1
Here is a patch that does away with the special handling of NULL values
in psql backslash commands.
Yours,
Laurenz Albe