Automatic connection reset is a nice feature for server development, IMO. Is it really useful for anything else is a good question.
I use it all the time for application development; my rebuild script will forcibly kick everyone out to re-create the database. I put that in because I invariably end up with a random psql sitting somewhere that I don't want to track down.
What currently stinks though is if the connection is dead and the next command I run is a \i, psql just dies instead of re-connecting. It'd be nice if before reading the script it checked connection status and attempted a reconnect.
At least an option to control that behavior seems like a good idea, maybe even set it to 'no reconnect' by default, so that people who really use it can make conscious choice about enabling it in their .psqlrc or elsewhere.
+1, I don't think it needs to be the default.
So if we go in this direction, should the option be specified from command line or available via psqlrc (or both?) I think both make sense.
What should be the option and control variable names? Something like: --reconnect and RECONNECT? Should we allow reconnect in non-interactive mode? I have no use case for that, but it might be different for others. If non-interactive is not supported then it could be a simple boolean variable, otherwise we might want something like a tri-state: on / off / interactive (the last one being the default).
In any case it would make sense to rectify the difference in current behavior when the failing command is \i somefile.sql. It would be appropriate to stop parsing the file and reset the connection.