PostgreSQL auto-reconnect in PDO contructor for permanent connections: request for comments

Hello,

I'm new to this list so please excuse me if I ask something stupid :)
I've searched the mailing list archives but did not see an answer to my
question.

I'm currently experiencing a mis-feature in the pg PDO driver: when one
calls the PDO constructor with permanent connection, the connection
status is checked by simply calling PQstatus(). This is not sufficient
in some circumstances when a cache effect may occur. When comparing the
implementations between PDO::psql and the pg_* functions, I've noticed
that the pg_pconnect() functions issue a "SELECT 1" on the link to make
sure that the connection is really alive. The MySQL PDO driver does this
by calling mysql_ping() on the connection to test it. I've not dig into
the other drivers to see how they do that.
This is something I'd like to add in the PostgreSQL driver. In order not
to break anything in the current implementation, my idea was to add a
driver specific constant (named PGSQL_ATTR_DEEP_CONNECTION_CHECK for
example, or anything that fits) that would make the driver run a "SELECT
1" when retrieving a connection link from the pool to re-use it: if the
connection is actually broken, it would then be re-opened by the
subsequent code. The default would be keeping the way it works now.
Does this seem reasonnable?

Thank you for your comments.

Marc Barilley