Re: Comments on columns in the pg_catalog tables/views

On Wed, Oct 12, 2005 at 07:11:12PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> I wrote:
> > David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> writes:
> >> Before I dive into this, is there some reason why the
> >> pg_catalog.* tables/views should not have comments that match the
> >> descriptions in the docs? I can see where this could cause some
> >> maintenance issues,
>
> > Yeah. If you can figure a way to auto-generate the comments from
> > the sgml files, it'd be nice, but I definitely don't want to
> > manually maintain Yet Another set of per-column information.
>
> Dept of second thoughts: actually, perhaps see if you can generate
> the pg_description entries from the C comments in the
> include/catalog header files. There's already a strong motivation
> to hold those to shorter-than-a-line length, whereas the column
> descriptions in catalogs.sgml tend to run on a little longer, and
> wouldn't format nicely in \dt+.

My thought is that by the time somebody is doing \dt+ (or equivalent
in other tools than psql) on a pg_catalog table or view, they need to
see details and are at most slightly concerned about the formatting.
Speaking of formatting, isn't there also a formatting TODO attached to
that? IOW, shouldn't these be de-coupled?

Cheers,
D
--
David Fetter david(at)fetter(dot)org http://fetter.org/
phone: +1 510 893 6100 mobile: +1 415 235 3778

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