Re: Documentation/help for materialized and recursive views

On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 9:26 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 10:20 AM, David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> wrote:
>> With deepest respect, failing to provide documentation to users on our
>> widest-deployed platform seems pretty hostile to me.
>
> Yes, that would be pretty hostile. However, we don't do anything that
> remotely resembles that statement, nor has anyone proposed any such
> thing.
>
> Personally, I think this whole thread is much ado about nothing.
> Magnus is basically arguing that people might expect that CREATE VIEW
> ought to tell you about CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW also, but I don't
> find that argument to have a whole lot of merit. Views and
> materialized views are pretty different things; it is a bit like

How different are they really? Yes, they are very different from an
implementation standpoint, from an enduser perspective they really are
not. If they were, they'd probably be called something else..

> asking why Googling for "dog" does not give you information on hot
> dogs. The output of psql's \h command is intended to be a succinct

I'd personally say it's more like googling for dog gives me hits
specifically around "dog breeding" and not just dogs themselves.

> synopsis summarizing the salient syntax (try saying that five times
> fast), not a comprehensive reference. If you want the latter, read
> the fine manual. I admit that this particular case is slightly more
> prone to confusion than some, but I'm just not that exercised about
> it. Every bit of detail we add to the \h output is better for the
> people who otherwise would have been unhappy, but it's worse for all
> the people who did need it because it's more to read through.

True.

> Regardless of whether you agree with or disagree with the above
> statement, building a high-quality documentation reader into psql so
> that users who are running Windows but not mingw, cygwin, or pgAdmin
> can access the documentation more easily doesn't seem like the correct
> solution to this problem. I don't really object if somebody wants to
> do it (although someone else may object) but it's certainly taking the
> long way around as far as this particular confusion is concerned.

I still think a better option to that would be to get psql to provide
a link to the full documentation there.

pgAdmin could also do that, but doesn't - it gets you a link to the
main documentation, but not a context sensitive one IIRC.

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