Feedback-ID: id4a34324:Fastmail
Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2024 10:28:03 -0700
From: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
To: Dagfinn Ilmari =?utf-8?Q?Manns=C3=A5ker?= <ilmari@ilmari.org>
Cc: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>,
	Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>,
	"pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org" <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: documentation structure
Message-ID: <20240417172803.3xzcipouw74unuen@awork3.anarazel.de>
References: <CA+TgmoZ2F+K0j=6BOJLD=YfpJMdJRXC7sWmtXGRjx1Rq0x8PUA@mail.gmail.com>
 <CAD5tBcJUVQu=9zpr9C+Z=3SjxrECURtr_i1oipMqke4dpZXtyQ@mail.gmail.com>
 <20240416182310.2j6g5fqqcwi4s6wm@awork3.anarazel.de>
 <1355791.1713294332@sss.pgh.pa.us>
 <20240416201700.wyz7ojp3fr7222xt@awork3.anarazel.de>
 <87v84gi6xf.fsf@wibble.ilmari.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
In-Reply-To: <87v84gi6xf.fsf@wibble.ilmari.org>
Archived-At: <https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20240417172803.3xzcipouw74unuen%40awork3.anarazel.de>
Precedence: bulk

Hi,

On 2024-04-17 12:07:24 +0100, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker wrote:
> Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> writes:
> > I think the manual work for writing signatures in sgml is not insignificant,
> > nor is the volume of sgml for them. Manually maintaining the signatures makes
> > it impractical to significantly improve the presentation - which I don't think
> > is all that great today.
> 
> And it's very inconsistent.  For example, some functions use <optional>
> tags for optional parameters, others use square brackets, and some use
> <literal>VARIADIC</literal> to indicate variadic parameters, others use
> ellipses (sometimes in <optional> tags or brackets).

That seems almost inevitably the outcome of many people having to manually
infer the recommended semantics, for writing something boring but nontrivial,
from a 30k line file.


> > And the lack of argument names in the pg_proc entries is occasionally fairly
> > annoying, because a \df+ doesn't provide enough information to use functions.
> 
> I was also annoyed by this the other day (specifically wrt. the boolean
> arguments to pg_ls_dir),

My bane is regexp_match et al, I have given up on remembering the argument
order.


> and started whipping up a Perl script to parse func.sgml and generate
> missing proargnames values for pg_proc.dat, which is how I discovered the
> above.

Nice.


> The script currently has a pile of hacky regexes to cope with that,
> so I'd be happy to submit a doc patch to turn it into actual markup to get
> rid of that, if people think that's a worhtwhile use of time and won't clash
> with any other plans for the documentation.

I guess it's a bit hard to say without knowing how voluminious the changes
would be. If we end up rewriting the whole file the tradeoff is less clear
than if it's a dozen inconsistent entries.


> > It'd also be quite useful if clients could render more of the documentation
> > for functions. People are used to language servers providing full
> > documentation for functions etc...
> 
> A more user-friendly version of \df+ (maybe spelled \hf, for symmetry
> with \h for commands?) would certainly be nice.

Indeed.

Greetings,

Andres Freund