On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 5:17 PM, Bruce Momjian <br...@momjian.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/ -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
