Re: documentation structure

Hi,

On 2024-04-17 12:07:24 +0100, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker wrote:
> Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)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