Re: libpq documentation cleanups (repost 3)

On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 8:54 PM, Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> I am also attaching a few more of Leslie's changes that I think are
> useful.  The first clarifies a confusion Leslie had about the fact that
> "return" is referencing the return value of the function and not the
> value returned in the pointer.

Hmm. Well, if that's the confusion, I don't think inserting the words
"by the function" is the right way to fix it - it certainly isn't
returned by anything else. You could change it to say "It is also
possible for *errmsg to be NULL even when the return value is also
NULL; this indicates..."

> The second change is, I think, better wording.

OK.

> The third moves the "deprecated" text to the start of the function
> description.  Leslie pointed out that that is how we do it for other
> libpq functions, so we should move it for consistency.

That seems to me to read pretty awkwardly. You could perhaps strike
the chunk and the whole first paragraph and simply write "PQoidStatus
is an older, deprecated version of PQoidValue. It returns its result
as a character string rather than an Oid, and is not thread-safe." and
then cut directly to the synopsis. That would be consistent with what
we've done elsewhere; moving just that one sentence is not.

--
Robert Haas
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