Re: FWD: Re: Updated backslash consistency patch

Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> On Friday 16 January 2009 04:09:11 Robert Haas wrote:
> > I really wonder what is so terrible about the behavrior as implemented
> > in CVS HEAD. ?AFAICS, no one except maybe Tom has really specified WHY
> > they don't like it, just that they don't like it. ?I'm not sure
> > whether that's because (1) it's different, and they're used to the old
> > way; (2) it involves typing an extra character to get the behavior
> > they want; or (3) there's no way to search user and system functions
> > simultaneously.
> 
> Btw., the reason why I didn't like it is that hiding system tables is OK, 
> because you never really interact with them, but hiding system functions is 
> not, because you use those all the time.  It has emerged, however, that some 
> people appear to think of \df in terms of "what's available" and some in 
> terms of "what have I done".  And those call for different behaviors.

Yep.  I thought about what would be the ideal behavior of each backslash
command that supports 'S'.  Some \d commands are better with just user
objects (\dt), while others are better including system objects (\dT),
and some are unclear (\df).  (You have to love that.)

My feeling was to focus on the most used commands (\dt) and figure out
how they would behave best, and let the others follow.  Arguably the
\dtisv are good in current CVS, while it is unclear if \df is better or
worse than 8.3, and \dT is certainly worse than 8.3.

But frankly, with a very complex backslash API that is already
overloaded, I figured having a consistent 'S' to include system objects
was the best we are going to be able to do.  Once this is out in the
field we might get new ideas.

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
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