Clean up some unpleasant behaviors in psql's \connect command.

The check for whether to complain about not having an old connection
to get parameters from was seriously out of date: it had not been
rethought when we invented connstrings, nor when we invented the
-reuse-previous option.  Replace it with a check that throws an
error if reuse-previous is active and we lack an old connection to
reuse.  While that doesn't move the goalposts very far in terms of
easing reconnection after a server crash, at least it's consistent.

If the user specifies a connstring plus additional parameters
(which is invalid per the documentation), the extra parameters were
silently ignored.  That seems like it could be really confusing,
so let's throw a syntax error instead.

Teach the connstring code path to re-use the old connection's password
in the same cases as the old-style-syntax code path would, ie if we
are reusing parameters and the values of username, host/hostaddr, and
port are not being changed.  Document this behavior, too, since it was
unmentioned before.  Also simplify the implementation a bit, giving
rise to two new and useful properties: if there's a "password=xxx" in
the connstring, we'll use it not ignore it, and by default (i.e.,
except with --no-password) we will prompt for a password if the
re-used password or connstring password doesn't work.  The previous
code just failed if the re-used password didn't work.

Given the paucity of field complaints about these issues, I don't
think that they rise to the level of back-patchable bug fixes,
and in any case they might represent undesirable behavior changes
in minor releases.  So no back-patch.

Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/235210.1603321144@sss.pgh.pa.us

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/doc/src/sgml/ref/psql-ref.sgml b/doc/src/sgml/ref/psql-ref.sgml
index 7d0d3616573..f6f77dbac3a 100644
--- a/doc/src/sgml/ref/psql-ref.sgml
+++ b/doc/src/sgml/ref/psql-ref.sgml
@@ -920,6 +920,8 @@ testdb=>
         is changed from its previous value using the positional syntax,
         any <replaceable>hostaddr</replaceable> setting present in the
         existing connection's parameters is dropped.
+        Also, any password used for the existing connection will be re-used
+        only if the user, host, and port settings are not changed.
         When the command neither specifies nor reuses a particular parameter,
         the <application>libpq</application> default is used.
         </para>