Subject: Some doc suggestions

From: Justin Dearing <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2016 02:37:29 +0000

Switched jobs recently and returning to postgres after a long hiatus. The
docs are great, but I noticed a few things  that could be improved in the
area of catalot documentations.

   1. The CREATE/ALTER/DROP doc pages should have a link to the
   corresponding pg_catalog and INFORMATION_schema tables and views for that
   object type. The
   2. pg_catalog docs should have a link to their corresponding
   information_schema table or view and visa versa.
   3. Perhaps this page (and its analogs)
   https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/catalogs.html should have a
   1-3 word description of each catalog. Some are unintuitive. For example it
   took awhile to figure out pg_attribute was the list of columns.
   4. OID columns should have a note saying something to the effect of "to
   get the text name of this simply use atttypid::REGTYPE"
   5. I discovered that pg_catalog.name is a built in type today, but its
   not listed as a built in type. I've yet to find it in the docs. It should
   either be listed in the built in types, or the list of built in types
   should link to the list of "other built in types" whereever they are.

If any of those suggestions are ameanable where are the docs for
contributing to the docs?

Regards,

Justin Dearing

---

From: Justin Dearing <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2016 02:42:16 +0000

Ok addendu, it seems like the overview page for catalogs has exactly what I
asked for in the contents page. Any reason they can't be merged? Is it just
the nature of the doc system? As a postgres outsider, it seemed kinda
obtuse.

On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 10:37 PM Justin Dearing <[email-masked]> wrote:

>    4. OID columns should have a note saying something to the effect of
>    "to get the text name of this simply use atttypid::REGTYPE"

---

From: Peter Eisentraut <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2016 09:55:09 -0400

On 6/23/16 10:37 PM, Justin Dearing wrote:
> Switched jobs recently and returning to postgres after a long hiatus.
> The docs are great, but I noticed a few things  that could be improved
> in the area of catalot documentations.
>
>     corresponding pg_catalog and INFORMATION_schema tables and views for
>     that object type.

The correspondence between these three is not exactly as cleanly 
one-to-one as one might think.  I think this would be very confusing and 
not really helpful in practice.

>     information_schema table or view and visa versa.

same here

>  3. Perhaps this page (and its
>     analogs) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/catalogs.html should
>     have a 1-3 word description of each catalog. Some are unintuitive.
>     For example it took awhile to figure out pg_attribute was the list
>     of columns.

That is an automatically generated table of contents.

>     get the text name of this simply use atttypid::REGTYPE"

We link the OID columns to their corresponding primary key table.  We 
don't have reg* types for everything anyway.

>  5. I discovered that pg_catalog.name <http://pg_catalog.name> is a
>     built in type today, but its not listed as a built in type. I've yet
>     to find it in the docs. It should either be listed in the built in
>     types, or the list of built in types should link to the list of
>     "other built in types" whereever they are.

You're right.

> contributing to the docs?

You can send a patch to this list.  It's not very different from 
contributing code.

-- 
Peter Eisentraut              http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services

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