For peace of mind, pxadmin should say which database it will be operating on

[jester@…]

Every time I run pxadmin, there's a leap of faith involved - am I really deleting my own database, not somebody else's? I'm hoping it's an easy fix to make pxadmin say "delete the chip table of project jester" instead of just "delete the chip table?"

[eugene]

perhaps pxadmin should require a -dbname

[jester@…]

I second Gene's idea for a -dbname argument. Editing .ipprc every time to run pxadmin is a bit clumsy if I'm working with different databases in parallel.

[Paul Price]

pxadmin (and all programs which call pmConfigRead) already takes a "-dbname" (along with "-dbserver", "-dbuser", "-dbpassword" and "-dbport").

Should we alter pxadmin to require (some subset of) these? Or is it sufficient to echo the name of the database we're altering?

[eugene]

pxadmin does actually report the dbname.

the standard install has dbname set to XXX in the site.config for safety.

It is reasonable to consider this insufficient for pxadmin, and to require -dbname for it explicitly.

[Paul Price]

Fixed in CVS head: pxadmin now requires "-dbname".
The only place that I can think of that this would be a problem is in ippTasks/simtest.pro, and that already explicitly includes "-dbname".

[jester@…]

Paul said:

pxadmin (and all programs which call pmConfigRead) already takes a
"-dbname" (along with "-dbserver", "-dbuser", "-dbpassword" and
"-dbport").

Good to know! I didn't realize this because calling pxadmin without arguments only tells me about -create -delete -recreate as possible arguments. The same thing happens with a lot of other commands, which are only minimally self-documenting. So one thing I'd like to do in September, if time permits, would be to go through all IPP commands and add more --help text. This might answer a few FAQs right there on the command line.