Re: Couple document fixes

Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> Removing CC to pg-docs so that Robert reads it.
> 
> Excerpts from Bruce Momjian's message of vie mar 11 08:13:20 -0300 2011:
> > Kevin Grittner wrote:
> 
> > > relpersistence should be <type>"char"</type>, not <type>char</type>.
> > > Oddly enough, there is a difference.
> > 
> > I am unsure on that one.  We have many 'char' mentions in catalog.sgml,
> > and I don't see any of them shown as '"char"'.  (Wow, we should have
> > just called this type char1, but I think that name came from Berkeley!) 
> > The big problem is that the pg_type name is really "char" _without_
> > quotes.
> 
> One idea is to rename the type to something else.  We could keep "char"
> as an alias for backwards compatibility, but use the new name in system
> catalogs, and document it as the main name of the type.
> 
> Discussed the idea a bit on IM with Bruce, but couldn't find any really
> good alternative.  Idea floated so far:
> 
> * byte (seems pretty decent to me)
> * octet (though maybe people would expect it'd output as a number)
> * char1 (looks ugly, but then we have int4 and so on)
> * achar (this one is just plain weird)
> 
> None seems great.  Thoughts?

Any new ideas on how to document our "char" data type?

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
 + It's impossible for everything to be true. +