[DOCS] Date/Time Types : internals

2012-04-18 Thread Florence Cousin
Hi,

At the bottom of the page about Date/Time types (
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/interactive/datatype-datetime.html
)
there is this sentence :

Date conventions before the 19th century make for interesting reading,
but are not consistent enough to warrant coding into a date/time handler.


This sentence seemed very strange to me, and I am not sure to really
understand what it implies (or not) for the user. Could someone explain
that this really means and implies?

Thank you,

Florence Cousin.


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Re: [DOCS] separate Privileges section for SQL reference pages?

2012-04-18 Thread Robert Haas
On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 3:02 PM, Alvaro Herrera
 wrote:
> Excerpts from Peter Eisentraut's message of mar abr 17 14:40:37 -0300 2012:
>> It occurred to me that it could be useful to separate the information
>> about which privileges are necessary for a certain SQL command into a
>> separate section "Privileges" on each SQL command reference page.
>> Currently, this information is usually distributed across the
>> Description and Notes sections and sometimes hard to find.
>>
>> What do you think about this?
>
> Sounds good to me.

Same here.  I think that would be a really great improvement.

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Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company

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Re: [DOCS] Date/Time Types : internals

2012-04-18 Thread Kevin Grittner
Florence Cousin  wrote:
 
> At the bottom of the page about Date/Time types (
>
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/interactive/datatype-datetime.html
> )
> there is this sentence :
> 
> Date conventions before the 19th century make for interesting
> reading, but are not consistent enough to warrant coding into a
> date/time handler.
> 
> 
> This sentence seemed very strange to me, and I am not sure to
> really understand what it implies (or not) for the user. Could
> someone explain that this really means and implies?
 
You can get some idea by reading this page, especially the
"Adoption" section:
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar
 
I guess the point is that for hundreds of years, the same day could
have a different date depending which country's calendar you were
looking at.  I'm not entirely clear why there's a problem if you
pick the Gregorian calendar and apply it retroactively.  If George
Washington was able to adapt to his birthday changing, I think I
could deal with it, too:
 
http://www.archives.gov/legislative/features/washington/
 
II mean, there are still a lot of other calendars in use today, and
we don't let that stop us from using the Gregorian calendar.
 
-Kevin

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Re: [DOCS] Date/Time Types : internals

2012-04-18 Thread Tom Lane
"Kevin Grittner"  writes:
> I guess the point is that for hundreds of years, the same day could
> have a different date depending which country's calendar you were
> looking at.  I'm not entirely clear why there's a problem if you
> pick the Gregorian calendar and apply it retroactively.

Which is, in fact, exactly what our code does.  I think that bit in the
docs is trying to explain why we do that rather than try to get the
code to reflect what people really used back then.

A possibly comparable point is that for timezone info we use the Olsen
database (tzdata), which *does* make an effort to reflect historical
realities.  In consequence, at least once every several months we
get somebody complaining about what a strange GMT offset he's seeing
for timestamps before 1900 or so.  If there's anyone out there who
actually likes that behavior, we've not heard about it.  (Not that
I am going to try to get Olsen et al to change their policy.)

regards, tom lane

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Re: [DOCS] separate Privileges section for SQL reference pages?

2012-04-18 Thread gabrielle
On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 10:40 AM, Peter Eisentraut  wrote:
> It occurred to me that it could be useful to separate the information
> about which privileges are necessary for a certain SQL command into a
> separate section "Privileges" on each SQL command reference page.
> Currently, this information is usually distributed across the
> Description and Notes sections and sometimes hard to find.
>
> What do you think about this?

I think this is a great idea.  Do you need help?

gabrielle

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