Re: Unicode UTF-8 table formatting for psql text output

On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 1:49 AM, Roger Leigh<rleigh(at)codelibre(dot)net> wrote:
>> Please read the guidelines here:
>> http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Submitting_a_Patch
>>
>> I don't think it's very helpful to submit a patch intended to do
>> basically one thing split up over 10 threads.  The PostgreSQL style is
>> heavyweight commits, and I don't believe that there's any reason to
>> suppose that someone would want to commit any one of these 9 pieces
>> without the other 8.
>
> OK.  I have attached a single patch which combines the nine patches
> into one.  I did read the patch page above, but it didn't mention
> anything on patch size, so I split it into incremental logical
> changes in order to make it easily reviewable.  6-9 can be viewed
> as a whole, since 7-9 are minor fixes to 6.

I don't really have an opinion between one big patch versus multiple
smaller patches. That will come down to the code and whether the
separate patches are easier to read. It is sometimes hard to review a
patch when its separated from the code which needs the new
functionality though.

What I do think is getting my inbox suddenly blatted with a screenful
of patches from one author on one topicis pretty annoying. At the very
least please send all the patches as attachments to a single email. I
find it hard to understand how the linux-kernel list functions if
everyone's patches are all mixed up together and you can't save a
message and have all the related code saved but have to go back to the
list to find emails with similar names.

But the more fundamental failure here is that this email should have
been sent first. You dumped a whole pile of changes on us without ever
asking what we thought of the idea which is "not how it's done". It's
actually not as bad as it looked because it's actually not as many
changes as it looked like at first, but still.

Now I happen to like the idea of using UTF8 border characters (I
hacked emacs-w3 to use the terminal font in X to do something similar
bitd so maybe I'm biased by nostalgia though). And the changes are
actually pretty simple despite looking bigger than they really are.
They're actually only a few dozen lines.

I wonder if there's a UTF8 tab character or monospaced space character
or something which would make these tables display better in my mail
client. Currently they're completely messed up because the display
engine doesn't recognize they should be monospaced whereas the usual
output does get recognized. As a result the padding all gets collapsed
and everything is misaligned.

--
greg
http://mit.edu/~gsstark/resume.pdf