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From: Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>
Reply-To: josh@agliodbs.com
Organization: Aglio Database Solutions
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, pgsql-docs@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Do we need "Diagnostics" sections of SQL command reference pages?
Date: Wed, 3 Sep 2003 13:06:14 -0700
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Tom,

> I'm starting to look at updating the docs to match 7.4 error message
> spellings.  I find that a large part of the work I'll have to do is in
> updating the "Diagnostics" (formerly "Outputs") section of the command
> reference pages.  I am wondering if it wouldn't be better to just rip
> out these sections entirely.  They seem like nearly content-free fluff
> to me --- the listings of possible error messages are always incomplete,
> often out of date, and arguably useless.  If there is an error message
> that's not clear enough by itself, we'd better fix the error message
> instead of putting a gloss on it in the reference page.
>=20
> Comments?

I agree that we don't need descriptions of the meaning of each error messag=
e=20
in the command documentation.

However, the listing of potential error messages is *very* useful to=20
application coders for doing automated handling of errors.   Since we are n=
ow=20
supporting SQLSTATE responses, perhaps we could have error code ranges for=
=20
the commands?     Or is that totally unreasonable?


--=20
-Josh Berkus
 Aglio Database Solutions
 San Francisco