Re: Adding comments for system table/column names

On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 09:10:05PM +0200, Magnus Hagander wrote:
> >> > I think the idea of having the short descriptions in SQL and longer ones
> >> > in SGML is not maintainable.  One idea would be to clip the SQL
> >> > description to be no longer than a specified number of characters, with
> >> > proper word break detection.
> >>
> >> I prefer overlong entries to machine-truncated ones.  Seeing "Does the access
> >> method support ordered" for both pg_am.amcanorder and pg_am.amcanorderbyop
> >> thanks to the choice of truncation point does not seem like a win.
> >>
> >> We could store a short version in the SGML markup, solely for this process to
> >> extract.  In its absence, use the documentation-exposed text. The extractor
> >> could emit a warning when it uses a string longer than N characters, serving
> >> as a hint to add short-version markup for some column.  If that's too hard,
> >> though, I'd still prefer overlong entries to nothing or to truncated entries.
> >
> > I think the simplest solution would be to place SGML comment markers
> > around text we want to extract from overly-long SGML descriptions.
> > Descriptions without SGML comments would be extracted unchanged.
> 
> Not sure how convenient that is, but it would certainly work. And it
> would be a lot better than cutting off at word or character limits or
> anything like that.

Well, I figure we have to do something, because people would like those
descriptions, and recording them in two places is too much overhead.

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