Re: "box" type description

At Wed, 1 Nov 2023 11:36:01 -0400, Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote in
> On Wed, Mar 31, 2021 at 01:43:47PM +0200, Christoph Berg wrote:
> > Re: Kyotaro Horiguchi
> > I like that because it points to the "point" syntax so users can
> > figure out how to spell a box.
>
> I liked Horiguchi-san's patch from 2021, but once I started looking
> further, I found a number of improvements that can be made in the \dTS
> output beyond Horiguchi-san's changes:
>
> * boolean outputs 't'/'f', not 'true'/'false'
> * Added "format" ... for output
> * tid output format was at the start, not the end
> * I didn't add space between point x,y because the output has no space
> * I spelled out "point" instead of "pt"
> * "line" has two very different input formats so I listed both
> (more different than others like boolean)
> * I didn't see the need to say "datatype" for LSN and UUID
> * I improved the txid_snapshot description
> * There was no description for table_am_handler
>
> Patch attached.

Thank you for continuing this. The additional changes looks
fine.

Upon reviewing the table again in this line, further potential
improvements and issues have been found. For example:

character, varchar: don't follow the rule.
- 'char(length)' blank-padded string, fixed storage length
+ blank-padded string, fixed storage length, format 'char(length)'

interval: doesn't follow the rule.
- @ <number> <units>, time interval
+ time interval, format '[(at)] <number> <units>'
(I think '@' is not necessary here..)

pg_snapshot:

The description given is just "snapshot", which seems overly simplistic.

txid_snapshot:

The description reads "transaction snapshot". Is this really
accurate, especially in contrast with pg_snapshot?

pg_brin_bloom_summary, pg_brin_minmax_multi_summary, pg_mcv_list and many:

I'm uncertain whether these types, which lack an input syntax (but
have an output format), qualify as pseudo-types. Nevertheless, I
believe it would be beneficial to describe that those types differ
from ordinary types.

Should we consider refining these descriptions in the table?

regards.

--
Kyotaro Horiguchi
NTT Open Source Software Center