Re: Documentation/help for materialized and recursive views

On Mon, Jul 01, 2013 at 10:52:55AM -0400, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> On 7/1/13 10:20 AM, David Fetter wrote:
> > On Mon, Jul 01, 2013 at 10:05:24AM -0400, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> >> On 6/28/13 2:27 PM, David Fetter wrote:
> >>>> You can run \! man from within psql,
> >>> And if you're on Windows, you're Sadly Out of Luck with that.
> >>> Is there an equivalent we could #ifdef in for that platform?
> >>
> >> If you are using psql on Windows extensively, you probably have
> >> one of mingw, cygwin, or pgadmin handy, all of which can get you
> >> to the documentation. I don't think it's worth devising a
> >> mechanism for those not covered by this.
> >
> > With deepest respect, failing to provide documentation to users on
> > our widest-deployed platform seems pretty hostile to me.
>
> As I argue above, I don't think this is the widest-deployed
> platform. The actual platform in use is either mingw, which has
> man, or click-and-drool, which has pgadmin, both of which provide
> the documentation.

I'm not going to get into a big definitional wrangle here. "Has
available" (as in you could install software if you wanted to) is a
pretty long distance from "actually handy," which URLs are a bit
closer to.

> > There was an earlier suggestion that we provide URLs, which seems
> > like a decent way forward as those environments so locked down as
> > to disallow outbound HTTP are pretty rare, and non-networked
> > computers are even more rare.
>
> Does clicking on links in cmd.exe do anything useful?

Apparently

start URL

works for some large class of URLs. More details here:
http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/open-files-urls.html

Cheers,
David.
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