Re: Doc patch to note which system catalogs have oids

On 09/24/2012 08:18:00 PM, Stephen Frost wrote:
> * Tom Lane (tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us) wrote:

> > It's possible that it's worth expending a boilerplate paragraph in
> each
> > of those pages to say "this catalog has OIDs" (or that it doesn't).
> > But this isn't the way.
>
> I'm afraid I disagree with this. The oid column, in the system
> catalog, is user-facing and I like having it included as a column in
> the
> table in the docs, so users know what to use when doing joins.
> Including something in the boilerplate about it not being shown by
> default (or in the description in the table) might be alright, if we
> don't change that.

Having information about oid included in the (printed) table
under a separate heading, as in v2 and v3 of this patch,
is something of a compromise. It's hard to visualize
from the sgml so it might be worth building the docs
and viewing with a file:/// url. The trouble is that
it's visually ugly because the two parts of the
table are of separate widths. There is almost surely a way
to change this in the xsl transformation to html/etc., but I
would probably do a bad job of it and can't
speak to the sanity of maintaining such a thing.
(So it's probably a bad idea.)

Karl <kop(at)meme(dot)com>
Free Software: "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
-- Robert A. Heinlein