On Sun, 7 Jun 2026 at 15:29, ZizhuanLiu X-MAN <[email protected]> wrote: > The parsing logic in `ParseExplainOptionList()` (explain_state.c) accepts > the keyword `OFF` and treats it as an exact alias for `NONE`. This behavior > is functional but currently undocumented.
It sounds like you've assumed that every existing feature must be documented. This is a false assumption. Plenty of things exist in PostgreSQL that are not documented. You might be surprised to discover that you can type "ANALYSE" (the British spelling) instead of "ANALYZE" (the American spelling) to gather statistics on a table. Or that you can terminate your psql session with "exit" or "quit" (only \q is documented). The "exit" / "quit" feature was added to psql to help people who are not used to the tool. We don't want to document that, as we don't want that to become the default way that people use to exit the tool. One thing that having undocumented features gives us is a much lower bar that the undocumented feature can one day be removed. What value do you suppose documenting that "off" is a valid option for EXPLAIN SERIALIZE brings to the project? In my view, it's a negative value as it adds more words to the documents without teaching anyone about any new behaviour. I suggest we reject this patch and keep the documentation and code for this exactly as it is. David
