HI think that your patch is responsible for the added option at least.
I agree that the underlying issue that other parameters should probably
also be reused, which would be a bug fix, does not belong to this thread.
This doesn't seem to be a bug. \connect just establishes a new connection, not
reusing the previous settings for most connection parameters. As the examples
in the following manual page show, the user needs to specify necessary
connection parameters.
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/app-psql.html
=> \c service=foo
=> \c "host=localhost port=5432 dbname=mydb connect_timeout=10 sslmode=disable"
But I'm afraid the description of \connect may not be clear enough about
connection parameters, and that may cause users to expect the reuse of
all connection parameter settings.
I think that the typical use-case of \c is to connect to another database
on the same host, at least that what I do pretty often. The natural
expectation is that the same "other" connection parameters are used,
otherwise it does not make much sense, and there is already a whole logic
of reusing the previous settings in psql, at least wrt describing the
target (host, port, user…).
Anyway, I think this would be an improvement for psql's documentation or
new feature for psql. What do you think?
I think that we should fix the behavior rather than document the current
weirdness. I do not think that we should introduce more weirdness.
--
Fabien.