Re: Bug 1500

Karel,

> > Yeah.  Karel Zak, who wrote that code, is convinced we should remove it,
> > but I don't think anyone else is ...
>
>  I think I was Peter and Josh Berkus who convinced me that the code is
> bed. "we should remove..." is opinion only...

I certainly didn't recommend removing it before we have a replacement ready.

The complaint, btw, was that the current to_char formats intervals as if they
were dates. This results in some rather confusing output. I wanted to
improve to_char to support proper interval formatting, but apparently it's
difficult to do that without breaking other aspects of to_char (at least, I
was told that).

What we need is a function or functions which do the following:

SELECT to_char( INTERVAL '43 hours 20 minutes', 'MI' ) || ' min';
2600 min

SELECT to_char( INTERVAL '43 hours 20 minutes', 'WK:DD:HR:MI' );
0:1:19:20

SELECT to_char( INTERVAL '3 years 5 months','MM' ) || ' mons';
41 mons

etc. This would be more sophisticated than the logic employed for the current
to_char, as the interval would be re-calculated in the units supplied,
limited by the month/year|day/hour/minute boundary.

--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco