Re: Adding comments for system table/column names

On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 9:12 PM, Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 09:10:05PM +0200, Magnus Hagander wrote:
>> >> > I think the idea of having the short descriptions in SQL and longer ones
>> >> > in SGML is not maintainable. One idea would be to clip the SQL
>> >> > description to be no longer than a specified number of characters, with
>> >> > proper word break detection.
>> >>
>> >> I prefer overlong entries to machine-truncated ones. Seeing "Does the access
>> >> method support ordered" for both pg_am.amcanorder and pg_am.amcanorderbyop
>> >> thanks to the choice of truncation point does not seem like a win.
>> >>
>> >> We could store a short version in the SGML markup, solely for this process to
>> >> extract. In its absence, use the documentation-exposed text. The extractor
>> >> could emit a warning when it uses a string longer than N characters, serving
>> >> as a hint to add short-version markup for some column. If that's too hard,
>> >> though, I'd still prefer overlong entries to nothing or to truncated entries.
>> >
>> > I think the simplest solution would be to place SGML comment markers
>> > around text we want to extract from overly-long SGML descriptions.
>> > Descriptions without SGML comments would be extracted unchanged.
>>
>> Not sure how convenient that is, but it would certainly work. And it
>> would be a lot better than cutting off at word or character limits or
>> anything like that.
>
> Well, I figure we have to do something, because people would like those
> descriptions, and recording them in two places is too much overhead.

Agreed, this is definitely better than the other options there. And
the best suggetsion so far.

--
Magnus Hagander
Me: http://www.hagander.net/
Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/