In reviewing another patch, I noticed that the documentation had an xref to a fairly large page of documentation (create_table.sgml), and I wondered if that link was chosen because the original author genuinely felt the entire page was relevant, or merely because a more granular link did not exist at the time, and this link had been carried forward since then while the referenced page grew in complexity.
In the interest of narrowing the problem down to a manageable size, I wrote a script (attached) to find all xrefs and rank them by criteria[1] that I believe hints at the possibility that the xrefs should be more granular than they are. I intend to use the script output below as a guide for manually reviewing the references and seeing if there are opportunities to guide the reader to the relevant section of those pages. In case anyone is curious, here is a top excerpt of the script output: file_name link_name link_count line_count num_refentries --------------------------------- ---------------------------- ---------- ---------- -------------- ref/psql-ref.sgml app-psql 20 5215 1 ecpg.sgml ecpg-sql-allocate-descriptor 4 10101 17 ref/create_table.sgml sql-createtable 23 2437 1 ref/select.sgml sql-select 23 2207 1 ref/create_function.sgml sql-createfunction 30 935 1 ref/alter_table.sgml sql-altertable 12 1776 1 ref/pg_dump.sgml app-pgdump 11 1545 1 ref/pg_basebackup.sgml app-pgbasebackup 11 1008 1 ref/create_type.sgml sql-createtype 10 1029 1 ref/create_index.sgml sql-createindex 9 999 1 ref/postgres-ref.sgml app-postgres 10 845 1 ref/copy.sgml sql-copy 7 1081 1 ref/create_role.sgml sql-createrole 13 511 1 ref/grant.sgml sql-grant 13 507 1 ref/create_foreign_table.sgml sql-createforeigntable 14 455 1 ref/insert.sgml sql-insert 8 792 1 ref/pg_ctl-ref.sgml app-pg-ctl 8 713 1 ref/create_trigger.sgml sql-createtrigger 7 777 1 ref/set.sgml sql-set 15 332 1 ref/create_aggregate.sgml sql-createaggregate 6 805 1 ref/initdb.sgml app-initdb 8 588 1 ref/create_policy.sgml sql-createpolicy 7 655 1 dblink.sgml contrib-dblink-connect 1 2136 19 ref/create_subscription.sgml sql-createsubscription 9 472 1 Some of these will clearly be false positives. For instance, dblink.sgml and ecpg.sgml have a lot of refentries, but they seem to lack a global "top" refentry which I assumed would be there. On the other hand, I have to wonder if the references to psql might be to a specific feature of the tool, and perhaps we can create refentries to those. [1] The criteria is: must be first refentry in file, file must be at least 200 lines long, then rank by lines*references, 2x for referencing the top refentry when others exist
xref-analysis.sh
Description: application/shellscript
