Re: Adding comments for system table/column names

On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 5:17 PM, Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 07:03:49AM -0400, Noah Misch wrote:
>> On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 01:29:21PM -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
>> > There was a thread in January of 2012 where we discussed the idea of
>> > pulling system table/column name descriptions from the SGML docs and
>> > creating SQL comments for them:
>> >
>> > http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2012-01/msg00837.php
>> >
>> > Magnus didn't seem to like the idea:
>> >
>> > http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2012-01/msg00848.php
>> >
>> > Well, I'd expect some of those columns to get (at least over time)
>> > significantly more detailed information than they have now. Certainly
>> > more than you'd put in comments in the catalogs. And having some sort
>> > of combination there seems to overcomplicate things...
>> >
>> > 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.

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