Re: psql \d+ and oid display

Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> writes:
> On Tue, Apr  1, 2014 at 11:30:54AM -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
>> Frankly, I think this is all completely wrong-headed.  \d+ should
>> display *everything*.  That's what the + means, isn't it?  Coming up
>> with complex rules for which things get shown and which things get
>> hidden just makes the output harder to understand, without any
>> compensating benefit.

> Well, there are lot of _other_ things we could display about the table
> that we don't.  Are you suggesting we add those too?  What about
> "Replica Identity"?  Should that always display?

> The bottom line is we already have complex rules to display only what is
> _reasonable_.  If you want everything, you have to look at the system
> tables.

Yeah.  All of the \d commands are compromises between verbosity and
displaying all needful information, so I don't think that Robert's
proposed approach is particularly helpful.  It would only lead to
requests for \d-plus-one-half mode once people realized that "everything"
is too much.  (I'd rather go in the direction of \d++ yielding extra
info, if we ever decide to have more than two verbosity levels.)

I do think there's some merit to the argument about "it's been like
this for years, why change it?".  But if you reject backwards
compatibility as an overriding factor here, the currently-proposed
patch seems the sanest design to me.
        regards, tom lane