input.c

psql's \s (print command history) doesn't work at all with recent libedit
versions when printing to the terminal, because libedit tries to do an
fchmod() on the target file which will fail if the target is /dev/tty.
(We'd already noted this in the context of the target being /dev/null.)
Even before that, it didn't work pleasantly, because libedit likes to
encode the command history file (to ensure successful reloading), which
renders it nigh unreadable, not to mention significantly different-looking
depending on exactly which libedit version you have.  So let's forget using
write_history() for this purpose, and instead print the data ourselves,
using logic similar to that used to iterate over the history for newline
encoding/decoding purposes.

While we're at it, insert the ability to use the pager when \s is printing
to the terminal.  This has been an acknowledged shortcoming of \s for many
years, so while you could argue it's not exactly a back-patchable bug fix
it still seems like a good improvement.  Anyone who's seriously annoyed
at this can use "\s /dev/tty" or local equivalent to get the old behavior.

Experimentation with this showed that the history iteration logic was
actually rather broken when used with libedit.  It turns out that with
libedit you have to use previous_history() not next_history() to advance
to more recent history entries.  The easiest and most robust fix for this
seems to be to make a run-time test to verify which function to call.
We had not noticed this because libedit doesn't really need the newline
encoding logic: its own encoding ensures that command entries containing
newlines are reloaded correctly (unlike libreadline).  So the effective
behavior with recent libedits was that only the oldest history entry got
newline-encoded or newline-decoded.  However, because of yet other bugs in
history_set_pos(), some old versions of libedit allowed the existing loop
logic to reach entries besides the oldest, which means there may be libedit
~/.psql_history files out there containing encoded newlines in more than
just the oldest entry.  To ensure we can reload such files, it seems
appropriate to back-patch this fix, even though that will result in some
incompatibility with older psql versions (ie, multiline history entries
written by a psql with this fix will look corrupted to a psql without it,
if its libedit is reasonably up to date).

Stepan Rutz and Tom Lane