Re: documentation structure

On Thu, Apr 18, 2024 at 2:37 AM Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker
<ilmari(at)ilmari(dot)org> wrote:
>
> Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> writes:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > On 2024-04-17 12:07:24 +0100, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker wrote:
> >> Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> writes:
> >> > I think the manual work for writing signatures in sgml is not insignificant,
> >> > nor is the volume of sgml for them. Manually maintaining the signatures makes
> >> > it impractical to significantly improve the presentation - which I don't think
> >> > is all that great today.
> >>
> >> And it's very inconsistent. For example, some functions use <optional>
> >> tags for optional parameters, others use square brackets, and some use
> >> <literal>VARIADIC</literal> to indicate variadic parameters, others use
> >> ellipses (sometimes in <optional> tags or brackets).
> >
> > That seems almost inevitably the outcome of many people having to manually
> > infer the recommended semantics, for writing something boring but nontrivial,
> > from a 30k line file.
>
> As Corey mentioned elsethread, having a markup style guide (maybe a
> comment at the top of the file?) would be nice.
>
> >> > And the lack of argument names in the pg_proc entries is occasionally fairly
> >> > annoying, because a \df+ doesn't provide enough information to use functions.
> >>
> >> I was also annoyed by this the other day (specifically wrt. the boolean
> >> arguments to pg_ls_dir),
> >
> > My bane is regexp_match et al, I have given up on remembering the argument
> > order.
>
> There's a thread elsewhere about those specifically, but I can't be
> bothered to find the link right now.
>
> >> and started whipping up a Perl script to parse func.sgml and generate
> >> missing proargnames values for pg_proc.dat, which is how I discovered the
> >> above.
> >
> > Nice.
> >
> >> The script currently has a pile of hacky regexes to cope with that,
> >> so I'd be happy to submit a doc patch to turn it into actual markup to get
> >> rid of that, if people think that's a worhtwhile use of time and won't clash
> >> with any other plans for the documentation.
> >
> > I guess it's a bit hard to say without knowing how voluminious the changes
> > would be. If we end up rewriting the whole file the tradeoff is less clear
> > than if it's a dozen inconsistent entries.
>
> It turned out to not be that many that used [] for optional parameters,
> see the attached patch.
>

hi.
I manually checked the html output. It looks good to me.